Page 4387 - Week 12 - Thursday, 24 October 2019
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The Greens support light rail extending south of the lake, creating a north-south spine stretching from Gungahlin to Woden. From there, many options are opened up to extend further to Mawson and Tuggeranong, and to extend light rail west to Weston Creek and Molonglo. An intersecting route connecting Belconnen to the city, Russell and the airport is also an option that has been identified for the future.
I mentioned earlier that if we build a sustainable city for the future, we also build a highly livable and convenient city. That is because livability and convenience are the natural results of building a sustainable city. It is a beautiful coincidence. To become a sustainable city, we take actions like using renewable electricity, prioritising light rail and other zero-emissions transport, becoming more compact and planting more trees. There are also more actions that the community support. It makes their lives better and it makes the community a great place to live. It avoids the kinds of problems that people hate: congestion, pollution, inconvenience, costs.
In contrast, if we take a myopic view and continue to casually entrench car dominance, we do not end up with a livable city; we end up with the opposite. The Greens have said this repeatedly and we will continue to argue this point. There are plenty of experts—planners, climate scientists, sociologists and others—who support this view.
If we want to have a livable city in the future and if we want to have a genuine response to climate change and emissions in this city, then we need to take a more prudent and reluctant approach to road building. That is where light rail plays a really important role. By giving the community good alternatives, we make a different future possible for our community. That is what we want to do. We want to make people’s lives convenient. We want to have good quality of life for residents of this city, and light rail as a key transport mode is a really important contributor to that.
It would be remiss of me not to touch on a few of the remarks made by Miss C Burch. A number of them warrant exploration. She is critical of the government for not releasing the anticipated costs of stage 2A. Miss Burch was not here in the previous Assembly when the government became the first and only government in Australia to release the full business case for light rail stage 1. I think that demonstrates an excellent record of transparency, and an unprecedented record of transparency compared to other Australian governments, when it comes to how we have shared information with the community on this project. But in terms of releasing the expected price for light rail 2A, it makes no sense from a negotiating point of view for the government to condition the market to what price we are willing to pay. We need to make sure that the government goes into this with a competitive approach.
If Miss Burch was about to go and buy a house and it was up for auction, would she go in there and tell everyone at the auction, “Hey, everybody, I’m prepared to pay $600,000”? She is not going to do that. She is not going to signal how much she is willing to pay. She is going to have a strategy and she is going to be trying to get it for the best possible price she can. That is what this government is doing. It is making sure that we get light rail stage 2A at the best, most competitive price we can for our community whilst at the same time getting a high quality project and meeting the requirements of the commonwealth government and the designated land issues that arise in the areas that stage 2A will be required to travel through.
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