Page 2010 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 4 June 2019
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Parents, teachers and wider school communities believe that the changes are putting children at risk. Therefore, your petitioners request that the Assembly call on the ACT Government to reconsider the recent changes and further commit to improving the dedicated school transport network.
The Clerk having announced that the terms of the petitions would be recorded in Hansard and referred to the appropriate ministers for response pursuant to standing order 100, the petitions were received.
Motion to take note of petitions
MADAM SPEAKER: Pursuant to standing order 98A, I move:
That the petitions so lodged be noted.
Planning—Phillip and Parkwood—petitions 25-18, 15-19 and 16-19
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.03): I would like to speak to the petitions which I lodged. Firstly, I would like to speak to the petitions on Easty Street, which is in my electorate of Murrumbidgee. I am pleased to support the petitions on behalf of my constituents and because until fairly recently I was living there. The petitions cover a number of things. Firstly, there are the N10 and N12 developments. For people who have no idea what that means, which would be almost anyone who has not been studying the plans, they are just across Yarralumla Creek from Woden town centre, just behind the cop shop and next to the Health Point building.
There are two potentially very large, very tall buildings. If you go immediately south of them, you will find a collection of three-storey buildings, three-storey multi-unit apartments, some of which face north. People who purchased north-facing apartments with the expectation that they would be able to get sun in their north-facing apartments, as you can imagine, are very upset about the strong potential that they will lose that. There is no reason they would have been aware that this could have happened when they purchased the apartments, and, as you can imagine, they are pretty upset. But it is not just the people there who are pretty upset. There are quite a lot of people who use this area, and they would like to see more sun on the public open space.
When you look at it from a planning point of view, you wonder why, why, why? If you go a bit down Callam Street, you can see on one side, the town centre side, that there is the Sky Plaza. I will not enter into a debate about its artistic merit or otherwise, but I point out that it is tall and it overshadows Hindmarsh Drive. We could quite reasonably have had a bookend building like that opposite Sky Plaza, overshadowing Hindmarsh Drive. Everyone would have thought that was a fine thing to do.
I believe that the reason this did not happen is that the master plan and the precinct code changes took so long. They started off when I was in the Assembly before, in the Seventh Assembly. There was going to be a bookend building there. By the time the Territory Plan changes finally happened, Hindmarsh, the developers who bought it, had basically run out of patience. They tried to sell the site, unsuccessfully, and they have ended up putting three-storey townhouses on it. I walk past them every day on my way to the bus. It is a planning failure for Canberra.
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