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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1905 ..


MR CORBELL (continuing):

thousands more in compensation if the dragway has to go bankrupt and sue this Government. I have said to the Minister before in this place that he has a responsibility that he has not lived up to. He cannot say that he has not been warned if that string of events comes to pass.

Motion, as amended, agreed to.

LOCAL SHOPPING CENTRES - REDEVELOPMENT

MS TUCKER (10.43): I move:

That this Assembly calls on the Government to prepare, with full public consultation, precinct master plans for local shopping centres which shall identify the preferred pattern of any redevelopment of the existing commercial buildings and any relevant adjacent land, before approval is given for any redevelopment of part or all of these shopping centres as allowed in Territory Plan Variation No. 64.

This motion is about the orderly planning of our local shopping centres. It is about setting up a process to ensure that redevelopment of these centres is done in an integrated, forward-thinking way that will give us a better outcome than just leaving redevelopment to be an ad hoc process.

I give some background to this motion. Members will recall that there has been an ongoing issue about the viability of the local shopping centres in Canberra. The Government released a retail policy in 1996 to address the decline in the local shops. One initiative in that policy was to encourage a greater range of land uses in the local shopping centres and to encourage the redevelopment of the existing buildings to provide a better mix of shops, offices and residential space that would revitalise the centres and maintain their viability. This led to the Territory Plan variation No. 64, which allowed for the wholesale redevelopment of a local shopping centre if it could be demonstrated that the centre was no longer economically viable in its current form.

After a few delays, this was implemented in 1997, and since then two proposals have come forward for local shopping centre redevelopment, in Aranda and Latham. Both of these proposals attracted considerable criticism when they were first released, mainly because of the proposed overdevelopment of the sites with three-storey residential apartments that bore little relation to, and overshadowed, the surrounding neighbourhoods. The Aranda redevelopment has not yet proceeded to a formal development application, but the Latham proposal has been the subject of further refinement, and a formal development application is expected soon. One issue that has been raised with me by residents about the Latham proposal and also about another shopping centre, O'Connor, which is also undergoing change at the moment, is that there does not appear to be any overall plan for how new developments on particular blocks within the centres will be integrated with each other and with the surrounding residential areas.


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