Page 2050 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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(iii) commencement of the construction of dwellings within three years;
(iv) completion of construction of dwellings within eight years; and
(v) six-monthly reporting of progress to the Assembly and the ACT community until completion.
Madam Speaker, the ACT has historically led Australia in many aspects of development and housing. We have been a planned and designed city right from the beginning. The Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin design for the inner areas of Canberra is renowned throughout the world.
In more recent history, we were at the forefront of design in Australia on water-sensitive urban design. We were an early adopter of the approach of using lakes and wetlands as retarding basins and to improve the quality of urban run-off. Now this approach is mandatory throughout almost all of Australia. In the late 1990s, we led the way on highly walkable, mixed-use precincts. Gungahlin Town Centre was one of the first new, street-focused town centres in Australia, and Gungahlin is reaping the benefit of this leadership. Its town centre has far more street life than Woden, Belconnen or Tuggeranong town centres do, and the rest of Australia has copied from this.
But we are falling behind. We have had a few good new developments—New Acton and Crace spring to mind—but nothing that leads the way internationally and nationally. Most of the things that we talked about when I first started in the Assembly in 2008, like carbon-neutral buildings and improving the quality of infill, we are still talking about but we are not actually doing anything.
The world has moved forward but we have stood still. Europe in particular is developing housing mixed-use precincts that are far ahead of us on almost every measure. For example, the Hammarby urban renewal precinct in Stockholm, Sweden, is comparable with Kingston Foreshore in that they were built and planned in the same era, are both mixed-use waterfront precincts built on a former industrial area, are similar distances from their CBDs and have similar building heights.
But, unlike Kingston Foreshore, Hammarby has been delivered to extremely high environmental standards in areas such as waste, energy and water management. It has reduced its residents’ heating needs by 50 per cent over normal Swedish practice, which, given the temperature in Sweden, is a huge achievement. It has been so successful in achieving these standards that its approach is now known internationally as the “Hammarby model”.
So what can we do here? One option, which is obviously what I am proposing today in my motion, is a demonstration housing precinct. I would like to acknowledge here that members of Canberra’s design and construction industries have been pushing for a demonstration housing precinct for some time, notably the ACT Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects.
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