Page 1705 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 June 2021
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
time and the restorative waiting list time has been reduced to 10½ months. There were 97 clients waiting for full dentures with a waiting time of just under 11 months.
Again, if the commonwealth would come to the party and if the commonwealth had not halved funding under the dental national partnership over time—
A member: Shame!
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: Shame, indeed—we would, of course, be able to do more in this very important space. But the ACT Labor government has consistently invested and funded and expanded services, and through our recovery plans for COVID-19 we have seen more of our vulnerable Canberrans able to access dental health services.
Government—land sales
MS CLAY: My question is to the Minister for Housing and Suburban Development. The ACT government has a commitment in the parliamentary and governing agreement to refine land sale processes so that major sites are released for high quality proposals, not just to the highest bidder. In recent estimates, the CEO of the Suburban Land Agency said that the SLA sometimes uses place-making and tendering processes for major projects to get good, outcomes but they use auctions for smaller sites. But a collection of small sites is what builds the neighbourhood. These small site sales lean on the Territory Plan and DA processes to ensure that they get good outcomes. The SLA recently sold small parcels of land in Whitlam and Taylor for packaged lots and multi-unit sites at auction. How does the SLA ensure that these sales lead to high quality development for the suburbs?
MS BERRY: I thank Ms Clay for the question. As she noted, the Suburban Land Agency is engaging in lots of different ways in communities to make sure that it is not just building homes for revenue for the government but also building great suburbs that people want to live in and can call their homes. Examples of smaller sites where the government was able to use that place making work and consult with the community differently are the Gold Creek Homestead out at Gungahlin—I know that Yerrabi members will be interested in how that process is getting along—and the waterfront police station at Belconnen, which was also pulled off the indicative land release program so that the Suburban Land Agency, after conversations with me, could have a different conversation with the community to engage that kind of place making activity to ensure that the community had a chance to be able to participate in some of those smaller sites.
The Suburban Land Agency work really hard to make sure that they get feedback from the community about how future developments meet the needs of that community in suburbs, particularly through engaging them once they move into those suburbs with the Mingle program. The Mingle program has been an outstanding success in getting feedback and feeding that back into the Suburban Land Agency and the board so that they can consider, in their future activities within suburbs, how the feedback from the Mingle programs can be fed into that sales work.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video