Page 3243 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 21 August 2019
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The advantages of having EPIC within seven kilometres of the city and some seven kilometres from the Gungahlin town centre, and on the light rail route as well as the various other transport options that Minister Steel identified in his remarks, make it a very attractive spot that is easily accessible to both residents of Canberra and tourists. That is why I can understand the attraction of simply renovating an existing building on the site to provide a large venue for multicultural events.
I am also on the record calling for EPIC to be identified as an entertainment precinct to protect the long-term future of the music and entertainment industry without exposing residents or businesses to unreasonable or unexpected levels of noise. That, of course, is another attraction in considering EPIC as a suitable location for hosting multicultural community events.
We have been calling for community consultation in regard to entertainment precincts and suggest that any such consultation could also engage the multicultural community, as a significant proportion of our community, with a desire to celebrate their culturally significant events, some of which tend to be pretty vibrant and just a bit noisy, purely because of the number of people attending but also because of the joy and the animation of some of those events. If we are thinking about a venue anywhere we also need to be mindful of that as we provide the right noise insulation built into the venue to ensure that it does not result in neighbourhood conflicts down the line.
Ultimately what is clear is that there is a need for a large-scale venue, suitable for housing multicultural community events, that is larger than the existing Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre here in the city. That is a much-used and a much-loved venue by multicultural communities but it is often already booked or not large enough for some significant cultural events to occur. What is clear is that we also need to ensure that the purpose and the use of EPIC remain first and foremost for events and is protected for community and cultural events, as has been its use for many years.
I am very pleased to support the motion today. There is important work to be done in this space. We look forward to the report back to the Assembly on the feasibility study.
MR BARR (Kurrajong—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Social Inclusion and Equality, Minister for Tertiary Education, Minister for Tourism and Special Events and Minister for Trade, Industry and Investment) (11.50): I thank Mr Gupta and Ms Orr for bringing the motion forward and I thank members for raising their various issues and for their contributions.
I note that EPIC will continue to be Canberra’s pre-eminent large-format events space, and that it will need in the future to continue to accommodate a wide and diverse range of uses for the benefit of the community. I acknowledge the points that Mr Rattenbury has raised around its pre-eminence as an entertainment precinct, the current arrangements there in relation to noise credits, for example, how the many major events reflect its current setting, in the context of surrounding suburban development, and that, if there were to be any change to that, as in allowing more noisy events, that would clearly be something that the community would have a view
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