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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3686 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Group centres provide opportunities for major weekly shopping and other retail and commercial development to serve the respective needs of their catchments. Local centres provide a focal point for surrounding communities, and principally serve local convenience shopping needs. The Territory Plan encourages a wide range and mix of uses in these centres, including providing opportunities for residential development.

The broad range of permissible uses within the centres enable them to adapt to changing economic, retail and local circumstances. The provision for residential development not only contributes to the adaptability but also provides greater choice for the community in terms of housing options, and, in some cases, will reduce the need for car travel and create safer and more vital environments within the centres. This is what it is that we seek to achieve. Part of it is to actually create activity; to create a sense of life in some of these centres; to give them a certain density, a certain mass. We know that activity attracts more activity. Where centres appear lifeless, they wither and die simply because nobody wishes to go there.

As part of our efforts we enable sidewalk cafes, for instance. We make sure that future developments in the malls, the town centres and the group centres have active shop frontages that generate activity and provide security. Areas that are under observation and are well lit and maintained tend to be safer, and therefore they enjoy more visits.

It is important to emphasise that the living environments created within commercial centres are therefore different from the environments within most residential areas. By their very nature, that must be so. Commercial centres, by their nature, are areas where activity is facilitated and encouraged. We want people to congregate at these places. People who choose to live in a commercial centre environment know that and recognise it when they do so. Indeed, they choose to live there because of the very nature of access to transport or a cafe. That is what they are after.

A policy framework that requires residential area-type standards to apply in commercial centres potentially has the effect of diminishing the density, that level of activity, and therefore sterilising the use of the land for commercial purposes, thereby depriving the surrounding community of a high standard of access to goods and services. Not to understand that commercial centres have different needs, and to insist that they comply with the residential codes, may well be their death knell.

Rather than applying residential codes in a blanket fashion to residential development in a commercial area, design and siting requirements are more appropriately dealt with on a site by site basis and incorporated into the lease and development conditions for each individual site. Such lease and development conditions can make reference to aspects of the residential design and siting codes where they are relevant. You need to look at the nature of each site to make sure that you match lease and development conditions in order to give that site the best possibility of surviving into the future, rather than draping it with the multi-unit development code from residential which may in fact be its death knell.

The conditions applying to the release of the blocks in Kaleen and Giralang referred to by Ms Tucker already make reference to aspects of the multi-unit design and siting codes. I would be happy to instruct Planning and Land Management to review those conditions to ensure that the references are appropriate before the land is sold. However,

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