Page 4383 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 30 November 1994
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anything else. They value the physical beauty and the ease of living in Canberra, and the fact that our neighbourhoods are the envy of the rest of Australia. That is something that any ACT government has to cherish and try to maintain as best it possibly can as we go towards the twenty-first century.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Heritage and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (4.32): Madam Speaker, in broad terms I would agree with the concepts and the principles expressed by Ms Szuty in her speech. I would not agree that they actually matched the MPI, which has in its wording a criticism of the ACT Government, because I do not think there was any substantiation of that claim in her speech. She spelt out some principles that probably are fairly sound and would be generally endorsed. Whether they can be applied in every instance is another matter.
The ACT Government, for nearly two terms, or one term and a half, has been working very hard to refine and to improve its processes in respect of how it treats people generally and their neighbourhoods. We inherited, at self-government, a system that was fairly dictatorial. The National Capital Planning Authority was fairly strong in the way that it did things. If there was anything not related to that, it was so remote, it was so distant, that the citizenry had no real access to the Commonwealth bureaucrats who ran hospitals and the like. Self-government brought a change, and a change for the better. Over that period I think we have all been conscious of the need to improve our processes. We all make a great deal of consultation, and I think all of us do so seriously. Certainly, speaking for the Government, we mean what we say. I would not pretend that on every occasion, in every example, we have always achieved perfection. Of course, we never will; but we are setting about improving the way we do things.
Let me give an example. At Oaks Estate, during this year, we ran a process with the community to draw out with them how they wanted their suburb to be in the future. I think that is a reasonably good model for the local area planning that we are now undertaking. The community was invited to participate and it did so with considerable enthusiasm. The outcome, I believe, was an excellent one. It was not an outcome that said, "Nothing much can change here; we cannot do anything in this suburb". The outcome was one that acknowledged that there would be changes, but they would be managed and they would always enhance that little area. There are some advantages in the way that that was done. Oaks Estate is a very clear, discrete area. There is no difficulty in identifying who should be involved. Secondly, it is sufficiently small to allow everybody to be easily informed, and this allowed an open invitation for anybody to participate. As we look at models for our local area planning, it is a good one; but it is not necessarily one that can be immediately implemented. If we go to some of our larger suburbs, I am not sure that an open invitation to whoever wishes to turn up can be incorporated in the planning and is necessarily going to be the best way to go.
Ms Szuty made a comment that I agree with, and it is one that we have to keep well in our minds. In our local area plan, as in our decisions across Canberra, she said, we have to regard the neighbourhood as a whole and it is greater than the sum of its parts. I would ask Ms Szuty, and others, to reflect upon that. That means that we have to take a decision in respect of the whole neighbourhood, sometimes in respect of the whole city, and that no one small part of that, even numbers of those small parts, can necessarily
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