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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2760 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

years seemed to go on unchecked and unfettered. If you talk to both sides of the community, those for development and those against development, I think that you will find that they have differing views, but they would agree that there was a process, and that process was governed by the Territory Plan and all the laws and by-laws that fall underneath it.

For instance, if there was such unchecked development in the ACT, why did so many developers and community groups spend so much time in the AAT? It was because there was a process that people were going through. It was a process that we were attempting to make better. That is why we set up the high quality design and sustainability guidelines, so that we could achieve what I think we all want to see happen in the ACT but, of course, we disagree on how that might occur.

Mr Speaker, the high quality design and sustainability process, from the reports I am getting from individuals, has turned into some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. Instead of doing what we wanted, which was to guarantee high quality design, to guarantee sustainability, to guarantee a quicker, cleaner process so that Canberrans could get on with doing appropriate development, it has been turned into something much less than that.

I think that that attitude and the attitude that comes from the minister is evident in variation 200. Let's look at variation 200 in terms of dual occupancies. Mr Corbell picks a couple of small examples, particular fetishes of his-for instance, a triple occupancy. He said that there are no protections against triple occupancies in the Territory Plan. There are protections against bad triple occupancies further on in the laws and by-laws. You go through a process.

Perhaps it is appropriate to have triple occupancy on some of the large blocks that occur in some suburbs of Canberra, perhaps it is not, but you go through the process. To write them off and say that all triple occupancies are bad because somebody just does not happen to like them is not an indication that some thought has been given to what is being attempted to be achieved here today.

Mr Speaker, the one-size-fits-all model is not the model that will lead to a healthy, vibrant city, and it will not for a number of reasons. The first thing you have to ask yourself is whether this is the garden city variation, as promised, or the urban sprawl model of 1950s and 1960s planning that the minister seems to be so keen on. Where is the sustainability in this model?

You need to go to the dimensions that Canberra was, is and will be. I forget the area that it covered, but I was once given a briefing as the planning minister that said that at a particular time in the late 1960s there were something like 82,000 people living in that inner city area of Canberra. By the end of the 1980s it had dipped to 57,000 people as the demographics and the age profile of Canberrans had changed. With some urban renewal, it had come back to about 62,000 or 63,000 people when we left office.

The question is: is what Mr Corbell is planning to put into place today going to address those issues? The infrastructure that was built to accommodate a certain number of people, at great expense to various governments, needs to be maintained at

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