Page 3862 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 October 2005
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We will, however, examine a variety of options with industry to achieve a good outcome for public housing and for the community.
In the meantime, I am pleased to advise that Currong will continue to be used in 2006 for short-term, affordable student accommodation. Discussions are under way with the existing student accommodation managers to determine the arrangements for the 2006 academic year.
Canberra—centenary
MS MacDONALD: My question is to the Chief Minister, Mr Stanhope. Can he please inform the Assembly of what progress has been made to date in planning for the centenary of Canberra, and the level of community support for the planning work?
MR STANHOPE: I thank Ms MacDonald for the question. I am very pleased to keep the Assembly up to date on planning for the centenary of Canberra in 2013. As I think all members are aware, the centenary of Canberra will be almost certainly Canberra’s biggest birthday yet, as it should be, and an incredibly significant milestone for the city. It presents an unrivalled and absolutely unparalleled opportunity for Canberra as a city, as a community and as the national capital. Our aim, of course, is that in 2013, the centenary year, the attention of every Australian will for that entire year be focused on Canberra as our national capital and as the great city that it is. For we Canberrans, of course, it is a similarly unparalleled opportunity to celebrate the greatness of the city and the community that we are privileged to share and be a part of.
There has been particularly close cooperation. I am very pleased with the work that has been done to date, particularly by Lincoln Hawkins, who is heading up the secretariat underpinning the work that has been done by the ACT government, and to a greater extent now by the broader community, in putting together a framework and doing the groundwork to ensure that we celebrate the centenary in a way that achieves the outcomes that we all want for it.
It was in that context that on 5 October I, along with other members of the Centenary of Canberra Task Force, released the Canberra 100 discussion paper and announced two important competitions as part of the release of that discussion paper. One of those was a competition for centenary ideas and the second was a competition for a logo design. Already, both those competitions are attracting enormously broad interest and response from the community. At this stage we have already received more than 100 submissions of ideas of how we might celebrate or things that we might do. Some of them have involved an awful lot of thought, some of them are quite innovative and imaginative, and they are exactly the sorts of ideas that we were looking for from the people of Canberra. Some people are focusing very much on having a party, a good time; others are looking at more serious issues like memorials or legacies that might endure into the next century and be something to be celebrated on the bicentenary of the establishment of Canberra as the nation’s capital.
A great flood of ideas has come to the task force from across the spectrum. We are looking forward very much to the same level of interest in the logo design, with a special and separate design competition being pursued through our schools, seeking to involve
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