Page 1290 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 23 August 1989
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in coming to the first point, may I, with your indulgence Mr Speaker, commend my colleague Mr Moore who, when challenged, and recognising that he had been somewhat outspoken, immediately and properly, without any delay, withdrew his remarks. I think that is the way we should operate in this Assembly.
Would it be all right if I looked slightly like Napoleon now? Secondly, as a member of the Canberra Workers Club, as a long-time unionist, as son of a lifelong member of the Boilermakers Union, I am happy to acknowledge that I, like many members of this Assembly, came here as an itinerant worker and elected to stay here, and I rejoice that we live in a society in which such life changes are possible. I commend them, and I hope we may see much more of it.
Thirdly, I, like my colleagues, make no apology whatever for being unabashedly pro-development. That is the way the Residents Rally has been from the very beginning. We stress excellent and appropriate development in this city and we worry about inappropriate development. That has consistently been our stance, and I ask those who try to tell us that we are anti-development to rethink what they are saying, look again at our policies, and look at what we are supporting. I take pleasure in supporting Mr Kaine's motion.
MR MOORE (5.49): I rise to support Mr Kaine's motion, contrary to the sorts of statements that Mr Whalan has made that are misleading, because what I said, and I have stated it clearly and categorically at the beginning of my speech and many times after, was that we are talking about office blocks. The difference between construction jobs, whether you are building an office block, a hotel, a set of serviced apartments or something to that effect, is nil. The jobs are still there, and that is the critical factor. We are not anti-jobs. We are pro-jobs. We are pro-development. We want the development to stay within the plan. So this sort of misleading statement that is being made constantly by the Deputy Chief Minister, in the same way as he constantly makes misleading statements about Katharine West and the Residents Rally, is simply inappropriate.
But let me now draw your attention to some of the different costs that come into account when we have a construction of office blocks in Civic compared to office blocks in Tuggeranong. We will talk about costs in dollars to the community, because that is the most important thing. The reason why we refer to Tuggeranong again and again is that Tuggeranong is the area that has been left underdeveloped in terms of offices and work spaces. If our development of office blocks goes in Tuggeranong, according to a consultant's report to the NCDC - and the figures have been extrapolated from that by Mr Ian Morrison, who is here with us in the gallery today and who is a former transport planner from the NCDC, a professional - for every thousand extra workers that we put in Civic, it is going to cost the
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