Page 631 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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leading business organisations in this city. We know that it will bring new hotels to the inner city. We know that that will help with the retail sector, which is suffering, and it will bring some life and activity. It will actually give us a city centre.
Ms Porter talked about renewal in her 10-minute speech. It is interesting that there is no city centre because this government has consistently avoided it for the last 14 years. How will we have a cultural and social identity for our city? The best way to get that is to work on the CBD. So frustrated was the business community with this government they set up their own body—Canberra CBD Ltd—to do the work that the government failed to do.
This motion is a sad indictment of the last 13 years. It is a sad indictment of Mr Corbell’s two terms as planning minister, the only minister to lose the portfolio twice. It is a sad indictment of Mr Barr’s years as planning minister and Treasurer, and it is a condemnation of the Stanhope and Gallagher failed years because they failed to arrest urban sprawl.
There is Mr Corbell preaching like the prophet. But it is interesting that Charles Landry, the author of The art of city making, is an individual recognised around the world for how to make cities work. He talks about urban sprawl. He says on page 25 of his book, “Cityness sprawls into every crevice of what was once nature.”
What does he have as a picture to illustrate that? It is the CBD of Canberra. This was written when Mr Corbell was the planning minister. Mr Corbell is the architect of our woes because he did not do this job properly. There is no point saying that capital metro will fix this, because it will not.
Imagine somebody saying, “Yes, I am going to get a plane to the Canberra international airport so I can get on the tram to Gungahlin,” as opposed to a group of individuals who say, “We are taking the plane to Canberra international airport so that we can attend a conference in the Australia forum.” I know which one is more likely. I know which one brings greater economic benefit to the city, creates more jobs in the long term and adds to the identity and the prestige of our city.
It is interesting that the motion talks about the cultural, economic and social identity of our city. You only need to look at the cultural identity of our city to see that we have got an arts minister who released an arts framework two years ago and nothing has happened with it. Not a thing. Now we are reviewing it. They could not tell us last year who was doing the review or how the review was happening. Everybody was in the dark until we prodded the minister into some action. But when quizzed about the outcomes of the arts framework, she could not detail a single outcome.
We talk about economic identity. The economic identity of this city is that it is hard to do business with this government. They are not interested in densification because they simply wish to tax it. It is this dichotomy that we have here: this is a government that run a land-based economy and they balance their budget with sales of land—“Oh, we are short of cash; let’s sell another block of land”—without taking into regard what are the higher order uses of the land. It is a case of “Let’s just flog another block and get the bucks.” The problem is that they say they are interested in density but then they put a tax on density.
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