Page 3359 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 September 2015
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Wednesday, 23 September 2015
MADAM SPEAKER (Mrs Dunne) took the chair at 10 am and asked members to stand in silence and pray or reflect on their responsibilities to the people of the Australian Capital Territory.
Cotter Road—duplication
MRS JONES (Molonglo) (10.01): I move:
That this Assembly calls on the ACT Government to support the duplication of Cotter Road from McCulloch Street to Tuggeranong Parkway.
I am pleased to move the motion calling on this government to support the duplication of Cotter Road from McCulloch Street to the Tuggeranong Parkway. In 2004 the Molonglo Valley was originally identified for future urban development in the Canberra spatial plan. The Molonglo Valley has been planned in three stages, the first being Coombs and Wright, which has a huge number of houses and units already established and being occupied. The second stage is Denman Prospect and Molonglo, where the blocks are due to be auctioned shortly and development is expected to be underway soon. The final stage of this development is the Molonglo River.
Once all three stages are complete and at capacity over the next 30 years, the Molonglo Valley area is expected to accommodate a huge additional 55,000 residents. The government is very happy to go ahead with developing new suburbs and selling off blocks of land to people hoping to build their dream homes. However, there seems to have been no proper concern given to how long people have to sit in traffic on roads that are not adequate. The Cotter Road is no different.
The government has encouraged an enormous number of homes to be built but has inadequately planned for the roads. We have seen this in Gungahlin, with Horse Park Drive and Gundaroo Drive both being left for a decade. At the last election I was standing at the Gungahlin crossing with Ms Fitzharris and we were both campaigning for the expansion of Horse Park Drive. We had a substantive promise to do it and she was able to say to people that the government would do it. It is interesting that we are sitting at the end of another term of government and it has not yet been done. There is almost the same problem with Gundaroo Drive. My understanding is that Ms Fitzharris has been running a petition in the electorate asking for Gundaroo Drive to be duplicated, yet she is a member of the government that has sat by idly while that road is now overfilled for more than half of the day.
There is a similar problem on Cotter Road, where every day on the way to work people from the Weston Creek and Molonglo areas have only two choices of how to get towards the city: one is Cotter Road and the other is the parkway and through the Glenloch interchange. In both instances gridlock is experienced along the way. City councils around the country are managing their road congestion better.
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