Page 1440 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2017
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housing prices while the public and community housing supply remains inadequate; and they can reduce community participation by the removal of community spaces and public amenity.
Worldwide, cities are home to over half of the world’s population and produce around 75 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. The ACT has started its journey towards zero net carbon emissions: we are purchasing 100 per cent renewable electricity. We must make sure that we build a city that continues this journey by building energy efficient buildings; by preserving green spaces; by seriously reducing and eventually eliminating waste; and by creating a transport system that is not based on fossil fuels.
This legislation presents an unmissable opportunity to get Canberra’s planning and development system on the right track. The Greens will be amending this bill to help provide for legal infrastructure to help the ACT be a world leader in socially and environmentally sustainable urban development.
Canberra is growing by 5,000 people a year. In the past six years, it has grown by almost 38,000, which is more than the population of Woden Valley. How we respond to the challenge of planning and developing our city and its suburbs to accommodate this growth will determine whether Canberra realises its vision of becoming one of the world’s most livable green cities. The alternative is that we start to resemble the traffic-choked metropolis of Sydney, with its huge social inequity, air pollution, property development assisted corruption and towering high-rise apartments.
We need to start a conversation about how we can develop in a way that respects the fact we have only one planet with finite resources. Australia, I understand, has the biggest new houses in the world, which is simply not sustainable. The 2016 ACT state of the environment report shows that Canberrans are Australia’s biggest consumers, each of us having a global footprint of 8.9 hectares required to support our lifestyles. This is 3½ times the world average. This clearly cannot continue, and the Greens believe that one of the important jobs of the government Land Development Agency is to demonstrate new developments that are affordable both to the people of Canberra and to our planet.
As well as ensuring that sustainability is prioritised, in line with our commitment to put the community first, the Greens want to see the CRA and the SLA undertake genuine and meaningful community consultation for all new urban renewable and suburban land development. This means consulting with community members at the earliest opportunity and incorporating community concerns into all development proposals. It can be seen as more expensive, but the Greens understand that if you invest in working with the community at the onset you have a better quality outcome which the community will back.
The Greens’ view is that this legislation, while helpful, does not do enough to address the substantive issues with the directions of the two agencies, or governance, which is where I would say the Greens would agree with some of the concerns identified by Mr Coe. There needs to be more. For that reason, we have worked with ACT Labor to agree on some relevant amendments as well as moving additional amendments on
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