Page 958 - Week 03 - Thursday, 7 April 2022
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throughout all of our suburbs—quite a lot of them greenfields done under the policies of this government—there is diversity of housing, there is diversity of people and there is diversity of family types. There is something for everyone. This is the sort of environment we need to move towards, where you have the opportunity within your community, irrespective of who you are, to live and to have a place that suits you.
This is what the minister has been working towards and this is why I encourage it. It is not just in those greenfield areas; we have also seen it starting to happen in our urban renewal areas. There is a lot of work going on, particularly around the light rail corridor, bringing in a range of different housing types that start to build on the existing housing stock that is there so that there is more choice and more variety within our city.
I would like to pick up on the comments made by Ms Cheyne, and also my colleague Ms Clay, who said that it is also about the environment. We cannot just keep going out and going out. It is very commonly accepted within urban planning circles that if we continue to build into our pristine ecological areas there is a negative impact—that is, we do not have access to them. They cease to exist. That causes a lot of detriment and a lot of damage. It is a balance. We need to respect that, but the answer cannot simply be to keep releasing land,
There have been a lot of times throughout this debate when I have heard from those opposite that we simply increase supply; we put out more of these blocks. The implication is that we do not give consideration to where they are going; we have got to solve all the problems. It is actually a dangerous message to be putting out there because it is not going to solve all the problems and certainly from an environmental point of view it is going to create a lot of problems.
It also does not recognise the geography of how our current communities work. We have moved away from this idea of having big blocks and having employment scattered all across the city. We have employment in our clusters and hubs. We have our great town centres. We need to be providing access to those, not moving further away from them. Mrs Kikkert can go and have a look at these studies, because these ones have been proven and they are not cherry-picked. We know that if we continue to build out on the peripheries we create areas of disadvantage, because they have a longer transport task, they not necessarily have good access to the facilities that you will see cluster internally within a densified area, and do know that the outcomes are not as good for people out there.
There is a lot of work going on to rectify that, particularly in the outer periphery areas of Melbourne and Sydney, which are quite big, where people will spend an hour commuting from their home to the city centre. Canberra is not at that point. Canberra is not at that point, because of our geography, but we also do not want to get to that point. We can take the learnings from other places and we can apply them here so that we do not get to that point.
There are children in those areas too who have poor health outcomes, and that goes back to my original point: it is not about the type of house. There is not one type where you can say, “This will work and that will not.” It is far more nuanced than that.
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