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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3823 ..

Motion (by Mr Humphries) agreed to, with the concurrence of an absolute majority:

That standing order 76 be suspended for the remainder of this sitting.

MR MOORE (10.52): I present report No. 19 of the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment entitled "Inquiry into the proposed construction of Nudurr Drive, Palmerston", together with extracts of the minutes of proceedings. Pursuant to the resolution of the Assembly of 26 September 1996, the report was circulated when the Assembly was not sitting, on 18 October 1996. I move:

That the report be noted.

Mr Speaker, the inquiry into the proposed construction of Nudurr Drive, Palmerston, was assigned to us by the Assembly and was, indeed, an interesting inquiry. In this case, the committee listened very carefully to what the department had proposed and why they felt the need to construct Nudurr Drive and to construct it in the location that they had proposed. We listened very carefully to the views of residents as well as those of the Government's officials. In the end, the committee determined that we would endorse the work proposed by the Department of Urban Services for Nudurr Drive, including the additional $70,000 worth of improvements. In other words, we believed that the compromise proposed by the department was adequate.

The committee was concerned about information that had been provided to residents. They presented us with a statutory declaration that they had been given information from the shopfront. It was a statutory declaration, but we had no way of testing it further. Of course, we take a statutory declaration very seriously. The information was that the construction of Nudurr Drive would have occurred further from those houses than the plan actually proposed. There is a recommendation to deal with that. Politically, it is always much easier, of course, when residents register a complaint, particularly against a government department, to say to the department or to the Government, "You have it wrong. What we need to do here is to do it in an entirely different way".

In this case, the committee, I think, acted entirely appropriately, as our committees are inclined to do, in determining that the action taken by the Government was appropriate. But it was done after listening very carefully to the residents and going on site to understand the residents' concerns. We still do understand the residents' concerns.

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