Page 3051 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 22 August 2017
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debated at some length throughout this term of the Assembly. Clearly, we need more affordable housing and we need more public housing in the ACT. The statement of intent, when it is released, needs to have a very strong emphasis on delivering more affordable housing.
It also needs to have a strong emphasis on environmentally sustainable development. The ACT has the goal of being net carbon neutral by 2050. Clearly, our built environment is a considerable contributor to carbon impacts—our environmental impact. I think that is really important.
The minister talked a bit about better governance, which I was pleased about. Clearly, whatever the SLA is, we do not want it to have the cowboy culture that its predecessor, the LDA, had. And with respect to better community engagement, I think we can all agree that the LDA was sadly lacking in that area in some regards.
One of the things that the SLA needs to recognise more is that it is in fact dealing with most of Canberra’s urban areas and that we are not all suburbs. We are not all suburban. Light rail stage 2 is coming to Woden, and this will need as much care, love and creativity to make it work as light rail stage 1 has. With light rail stage 1, you could say the City Renewal Authority will deal with the areas which will be redeveloped as a result of that. But light rail stage 2 does not seem to have any of this sort of care and attention as yet.
It is not just light rail stage 2. One of the other obvious ones is the Kingston arts precinct. This will be very different from suburban development. You would hardly describe the Kingston arts precinct as suburban development. Of course, there are the other town centres as well. We do not want Canberra to turn out to be just Civic and the suburbs. That is not how Canberra was planned. This seems like a total rejection, in fact, of the NCDC’s idea of distributed town centres. While I am not totally in favour of the NCDC’s plans, because of the transport implications that they had, we will also have real problems if we just have Civic and the suburbs.
However, despite this, the Greens are very positive about the idea of the SLA, which may be a step up from the LDA. We welcome its establishment and we look forward very much to seeing its statement of intent.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bushfire abatement zone
Ministerial statement
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella—Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Minister for Planning and Land Management and Minister for Urban Renewal) (10.17): I wish to make a statement in regard to bushfire abatement zones as a response to the Assembly resolution of 7 June. As members would be aware, this report to the Assembly is the result of the motion passed in June this year in Mrs Jones’s name. I would once again like to thank Mrs Jones for her motion on this important matter.
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