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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1645 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

Then he lists a series of conclusions. They are not conclusions of the committee; otherwise, they would have been included in the body of the report. They are conclusions of the chairman. I must say that I am quite disappointed that the chairman chooses to put in the committee's report a foreword which purports to be the view of the committee but which is not, and which ascribes to me, as a member of that committee, certain conclusions that I never came to and that I do not agree with.

Mr Speaker, you will be aware that I have asked that this matter of the inclusion of prefaces in committee reports by chairpersons be referred to the Administration and Procedure Committee of this Assembly to determine whether it is a proper thing to do and whether the Assembly ought to accept it. I do not believe so, because that foreword gives a twist, a spin, to this report that was never agreed to by the committee members; it expresses nothing but the view of the chairperson. It just so happens that I do agree with the first conclusion. There need to be some changes to our planning arrangements. I have expressed my opinion about that by moving a motion in this Assembly, in private members time, which was adopted, which called upon the Government to negotiate with the Commonwealth to establish a single planning authority instead of two. It just so happens that that particular "conclusion" is something that I agree with. But I do not agree with the second one - that the proposal is a poor deal for the ACT. That is not my view. It is the view of the chairperson, perhaps. I dissociate myself from that preface and from most of its conclusions.

MS HORODNY (11.02): I am very pleased that the interim report has confirmed that this land swap deal, as it currently stands, is indeed a very poor deal for the ACT. It is something that the Chief Minister, as Treasurer, should be very concerned about. There appears to be general agreement across the community and certainly within the committee, and I think within the Assembly as a whole, that the Kingston industrial site certainly needs to be assessed for contamination. This assessment needs to be made public, and then the site needs to be remediated and developed. There is no argument on that score.

In recommendation No. 6, the committee agreed very strongly that the design competition does not need to be an international competition. In fact, it makes very much more sense to have an Australian design competition and for it to proceed in three stages. Stage one would be the competition for ideas about the uses that the site might be put to, including the transport options from Kingston to the rest of Canberra. Stage two would be the community consultation process where these ideas are put to the community for comment and, hopefully, for improvements and other alterations. In stage three, the Kingston Foreshore Development Authority would administer the implementation of the final design.

I am particularly happy that the committee is in agreement that the existing buildings on Acton be investigated for renovation and reuse. I think it is absolutely ridiculous that we consider a 30- or 40-year-old building to be past its use-by date. In other parts of the world and even in other parts of Australia, there is a much stronger commitment to renovating and reusing existing buildings, rather than just knocking them down. I am not saying that we should necessarily keep each and every building on Acton at the moment.

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