Page 4459 - Week 14 - Thursday, 1 December 1994
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Driven by this desperate need for more funds to cover mismanagement of existing budgets such as health and the need to fund their political correctness initiatives, the Labor Government went further and allowed the planning rape of virgin suburbs like Banks, just as predicted in the Masterplan Consultants report; namely, that it was likely that the demand for the dual occupancy type of development would be generally uniform throughout all areas of Canberra - new areas as well as old, Mr Minister. Is it any wonder, therefore, that this brutal open slather assault by medium density and dual occupancy development upon this city incurred the wrath of the residents?
By a rich irony, I believe, the person who presided over this urban pillage - the destruction and threatened destruction of this city's visual charm, character and culture - was none other than our own Mr Bill Wood, who is also the Minister for the Arts. Mr Wood is a man who has lectured and hectored this side of the house on more than one occasion and accused us of being cultural philistines. This is the man who has presided over the visual destruction of much of Canberra under the ALP's planning policies. I do not blame the Minister himself, not personally anyway; but I do suggest that Mr Wood, and I hope the Follett Labor Government, will have to accept in a very backhanded way Sir Christopher Wren's valedictory:
If you would see his monument, look around.
I further suggest that it is Mr Wood's misfortune, thanks to the financial greed of the Follett Labor Government, that he will not again attain the level of respect, whatever it was, for good taste he previously enjoyed in the ACT, after the planning debacle of the last 12 months. Despite the rising clamour from groups of residents - and I draw a distinction between groups of residents and residents' groups - wanting to protect their local suburban amenity, the Government would not move to an inquiry into the urban destruction they were allowing. It took the Liberal Opposition, with the support of the Independents, to force this Government into the Lansdown inquiry - a belated one at that. A check of my records indicates that the Liberals called for an infill moratorium on 28 June this year, and it was finally introduced as Mr Wood's Clayton's moratorium on 21 August, as the Minister himself has indicated. The Lansdown report is the result.
As I said earlier, we welcome and support most of Lansdown, and certainly the Government's response, because we believe that it will provide certainty both to developers and to residents in the planning process - save for one qualification, and I will come to that later. Up until now, I think the view of most of the Canberra community affected by the infill blight has been that the planning process favoured the developer. Whether or not this assumption is or was ever correct, the Liberal Party believes that most of the Lansdown recommendations, and the Government's acceptance of them, I repeat, will now provide certainty to both parties and, further, go a long way, although perhaps not all the way, to overcoming the ACT's residential planning problems. Nevertheless, the Liberal Party would like to place on record our objection to the Government's decision to increase betterment to 100 per cent when unit titled. This is at variance with the Lansdown report. Mr Lansdown recommended only that an unspecified increase in the percentage of betterment be investigated. He did not nominate an amount; he simply asked that the matter be investigated. Certainly, the question of 100 per cent betterment is at variance with the Liberal Party's policy towards the matter of betterment in general.
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