Page 149 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 May 1989
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Total hotel/casino staff of 370 seems a much more realistic figure...
I am pointing to this as an argument, saying that what we have is not clear; what we are told may not be the case. The point I am making is that we need a committee to sort facts from fiction.
There are grave doubts that section 19 is the most suitable site in Canberra for a casino. From a casino point of view many have argued for the importance of a downtown site. I wonder how many of the arguments are coming from the owners and managers of downtown hotels and their well paid lobbyists. We need a committee of this Assembly to search out the truth.
What is the attitude of Canberrans to an ad hoc development of the Vernon Circle to London Circuit section of Canberra anyway? Burley Griffin and some our early NCDC planners had great visions for Canberra. Those visions, and our new growing vision for our city, should surely include an overall concept of what we need for the centre of Canberra. A number of prominent developers within Canberra and from interstate have expressed such ideas to the Rally.
The Caldwell report on the social implications of the casino was enough to indicate to an unbiased Minister Punch that all would be well from a social point of view in Canberra. I hope that this Assembly will be gracious enough to hear Dr Kinloch present the opposite view to Dr Geoffrey Caldwell later in this debate - not, of course, to have Dr Kinloch speak against the casino, but to illustrate that the issues are wide and complex and ought to be properly heard by our own select committee in the public arena.
There has been no environmental impact study for the section 19 development, and the last thing we need is another situation like that which happened in Civic with the section 38 development where the environmental impact study was carried out as part of the Civic Centre policy plan long after that development had been started. It may well be that the plan, with its libraries, theatres and beautiful towering office block improves the environment and protects some of the city from the wind tunnels that have been created in places like Akuna Street. On the other hand, the opposite might be true. Let us not sit back and let this go ahead without at least doing our best to determine what is the best for Canberra.
With reference to the implications from other casinos, in speaking only yesterday morning to an Adelaide business manager in the tourist trade, whose particular business because of its nature has improved thanks to the Adelaide Casino, I was told that given the choice it would be better to have no casino. This was coming from someone who only a year earlier had been a devoted "casinoist". I have coined that word.
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