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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4336 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (7.50): Mr Speaker, I will make a brief comment about this report. It has only just been tabled, and obviously there will not be an opportunity for the Government to formally respond to it, so I might as well put comments on the record now.

I am obviously disappointed that the guidelines were not adopted. I heard comments made by Mr Moore about the long time it took to develop the guidelines and put them before the community. That, in itself, was a reflection of a very extensive process of discussion about what those guidelines should be designed to achieve. Nonetheless, clearly they have not met with the approval of a number of residents of North Canberra, and for that reason I accept the challenge which in a sense has been thrown down by the Planning and Environment Committee to go away and find, if possible, another better way of resolving the issues that that variation was designed to address.

I adopt the comments made by Mrs Littlewood. I think the point she makes there, about the problem of people not being prepared to accept change because it affects them adversely no matter how it is engineered to occur, is a very important point to make. Without casting aspersions over all those who might be involved in this debate, it is important to acknowledge that for many people this is about protecting what they see as the amenity of their present homes and ensuring that those homes are not seen to diminish in value. Sometimes those people will argue against a process of change because they believe that that is personally a bad thing to happen from their own point of view and they therefore argue that change on a larger scale should not take place. That is a fair enough point of view. We all act to some extent out of self-interest, but we also need to be very clear that we must serve the public interest in the decisions we make about the operation of the Territory Plan.

We cannot escape the reality that areas close to the city centre, particularly in North Canberra, will be subject to tremendous pressure for redevelopment and for higher-density accommodation. If we do not facilitate that growth in an appropriate, orderly and well-managed fashion, we run the risk of doing great damage to the fabric of the city, in that what we do by that is force artificial and inappropriate things to happen in other parts of the city because we have artificially constrained what might occur in a particular part of the city.

However, I accept that we have to go away and do further work on this. I note the comments made in the report. They are quite extensive and to that extent they are helpful in determining what course we should take to resolve these outstanding issues. Although I have not discussed this with my colleagues in detail, as far as I am concerned that will be a challenge we will take up if we are in government after the next election.

MR MOORE (7.53), in reply: Mr Speaker, I think members of the committee would appreciate the positive response from the Minister. We certainly did not set out to wreck the work that had been done. We set out to build on the work that had been done. We ran out of time to do that and we are pleased that the Minister will take that in the spirit in which it was given and continue to build.

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