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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (2 September) . . Page.. 2729 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I suppose the Chief Minister may be the appropriate Minister to write to Minister Warwick Smith on that issue, or it may well be Mr Humphries. Finally, we recommend that the Government "consider funding some noise attenuation measures in homes fronting Mouat Street, given that the traffic volumes along that street are not going to decrease". On behalf of the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment, I commend the report to the Assembly.

MS McRAE (11.43): I rise to speak because this was an inquiry of intense interest to a group of people in Canberra who have every right to be concerned about what has happened to their suburb in particular. Lyneham suffers in two ways. It is actually the back of an employment centre. There is employment along Northbourne Avenue that people seek to access. It is also the heart of employment for a group of professional suites in the shopping centre as well as at least three schools and aged persons homes. It is a very attractive setting for an awful lot of people to go to.

What has happened over the years is that not only has it remained an active employment centre but by being at the edge of the city it has in fact become part of a thoroughfare for a lot of traffic coming from the north and now from Kaleen and Gungahlin. For many, the tragedy began for Lyneham when it was not agreed that Ginninderra Drive should go through. I know that a lot of people have been pinning their hope on Ginninderra Drive being extended, as if this could solve their problems.

I, for one, despite what some people may choose to say, was very open-minded about the possibility of reopening Ginninderra Drive and would have been happy to recommend that, as other members of our committee would have been, if it would solve the problems. As the evidence mounted, it was clear that the extension of Ginninderra Drive was not going to solve the problems. It would create a series of new problems, and there was no way that Lyneham, in the contemporary development of Canberra, was going to be able to be cocooned away from the onslaught of traffic that is now coming from at least three different directions.

I think that the solution we have come to, for the moment, is a very practical one. The traffic lights can be regulated in a way to minimise the attraction of rat-running. If you go and speak to people, you find that every suburb has a street which people complain, quite correctly, has become the rat-running street of that suburb. Canberra was almost planned in such a way that one of the streets in each suburb would be the thoroughfare. It seems that Lyneham actually has three.

Tucked away in the body of the report is a point which is made quite firmly, namely, that now that this decision has been made by the committee, now that the traffic lights are to proceed, officials should get into close consultation with the residents to realistically put through some traffic calming measures. There is mixed opinion about those. Many members of the community simply do not want any traffic to come through at all and do not think that traffic calming is going to make much difference. However, I have a reasonable amount of faith in the possibility of good traffic calming measures. I have seen them in other suburbs. I think that, if the officials proceed with close consultation with the community, the community will find that there are ways to make their lives more bearable with the onslaught of the traffic that is coming through and will continue to come through.

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