Page 4193 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 23 October 2019
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Minister Gentleman has the hide to come in here and blame the Greens. He is the minister; once in a while, some responsibility should be taken by the minister for things done on his watch.
Scraping down every inch of topsoil in new developments has a number of negative impacts. The more practical one that I am hearing from people every day is that they do not have enough topsoil to grow the trees and the natural plants that are required to create mini-ecosystems in people’s backyards. If we do not have any topsoil and people have to buy it back, perhaps we are failing in some of the very basics of how we plan and build suburbs. We see it in Whitlam right now; it is just red dirt. And it is not just dust that is the problem; it is how we then grow back some kind of greenery for our families to live in, for the birds to live in and for the bugs to live in, and to keep the temperature down in those areas.
There is a complete lack of infrastructure. Residents were led to believe that there would be more than one school, and that there would be a high school soon after they moved into the new suburbs of Molonglo. There is no high school, public or private, and there is only one public primary school. There are quite a lot of people who have moved into this area, yet we do not have these basic provisions which people were promised.
The Coombs shops are a complete and utter disaster. You cannot just blame the owner. This is a government with a majority in the chamber. When something else about their own regulations does not suit them, they come in here immediately and use their numbers to change the regulations. This is the case I have been making in Coombs to residents: the problems with the developer of those shops are not just one man’s problems. If he wants to hold a whole region of a suburb to ransom, the rules should be changed so that that is no longer possible. It is not good enough that shops sit empty year after year.
Ms Le Couteur is not quite right, because there actually is one shop in the Coombs shops. One valiant man, who gets broken into on a regular basis, is providing that suburb with bread and milk, with biscuits, with some food, and with some cooked food. I applaud him because he takes the risk that nobody else is willing to take to provide that suburb with something they can buy locally.
There is so much work to do to get those shops filled and busy. If the minister is not meeting with that developer every single week until the issues are resolved, he is not doing his job properly.
Ms Le Couteur’s motion also makes the point that there is no district shopping centre. At the last election, the Canberra Liberals promised to start building a group centre for Molonglo. The land has been set aside; the placement is known. It would be possible to build a major supermarket and a car park just like what was done in the early years of Gungahlin. Other infrastructure can come later.
It is unreasonable to have three suburbs completely filled, and another on the way, and still not have a major supermarket in the area. It affects Cooleman Court and how
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