Page 4619 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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peninsula. That was the last recommendation from the planning committee so it will come as no surprise that I have moved my amendment. The site is currently zoned RZ1 suburban residential. As long as it has that zoning, the government of the day can move quickly to an estate development process. If Coombs peninsula is to be protected permanently, it needs to be rezoned to an environment and recreation zone. That is what my amendment seeks to do.
My amendment also puts in a deadline, 30 June 2020. That would not normally have been an achievable time frame for a rezoning. However, in this case the government has available a quicker option that could be done by then. The obvious option is to follow the committee’s suggestion of adding the change into draft variation 360. If that was done, it would be possible to have this rezoning in place by the end of February 2010.
In conclusion, the Greens will be supporting Mrs Jones’s excellent motion. I hope that Mrs Jones and the Liberals will support my small amendment, which will strengthen the motion by addressing the zoning of the site.
I would like to acknowledge the hard work of the Conservation Council and its members, for about a decade, to protect the Coombs peninsula. I also acknowledge the efforts of the many local residents over the past couple of years. I hope that the Assembly will deliver for, I think, slightly over 500 people who signed the petition that Mrs Jones presented to the Assembly this morning. For those people, the pink-tailed worm-lizards—probably more than 500 of them, I assume—and all the people who want to protect our wonderful local environment, I hope that the Assembly will support my amendment and Mrs Jones’s motion.
MR PARTON (Brindabella) (11.51): I think it is abundantly clear that everyone is on the same page here; everyone except the government. The community is on this page.
I fully support Mrs Jones’s motion. We all had the ability to sit and listen to the evidence that was given to the inquiry here. Being on the committee, I had a better opportunity than most, but everyone had the opportunity to listen to the likes of John Hutchison, who is a private citizen who lives in Coombs. He said:
Once it is gone, it is lost forever, and in the long run we will look back and say, “Why wasn’t this place protected? Who was so short-sighted as to develop this for a small number of residential blocks?”
Mr Hutchison also pointed out that the only bushland trees left in Coombs are on the Coombs peninsula. I remind the Assembly that only weeks ago we had a debate in this chamber about the planning mistakes that have been made in Molonglo, in particular how those planning mistakes have attacked the tree canopy in Molonglo, and that there is very little likelihood of that being corrected in the short term. It means that these bushland trees on the Coombs peninsula become even more important than they would have been.
We also heard from Professor Ian Falconer from the Conservation Council. My Greens colleague Ms Le Couteur pointed out that the Conservation Council have been fighting this fight regarding Coombs peninsula since at least 2012.
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