Page 4947 - Week 15 - Thursday, 15 December 2005
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Businesses would have numerous reasons to relocate along the transit route—reduced general transportation costs, access to larger pools of potential services, jobs, customers and employees. There are numerous historical and contemporary examples of this. For example, value capture was used to develop the rail networks in the United States and was initially proposed by the South Australian government to fund the Adelaide to Darwin railway. Today Hong Kong’s rail transit system receives no subsidy, all costs including interest are met from land rents from developments in station areas alone.
Surplus values have been generated from Washington DC’s Metro and the London tube extension. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, you are probably saying to yourself, “These are high density cities with little bearing on Canberra’s situation.” Much closer is the Dublin area regional transport system. In 1991 dollars, the development added $62 million to surrounding property values where the DART was built. Brisbane has seen the same increase in land values along its south-eastern busway. Investors gained from increased land values along a permanent route. This encouraged medium to long-term investment and permanent business relocation.
To sum up, Dr Foskey is right—we have to adapt our current car dependent city in response to the challenges of declining oil supplies, higher prices and climate change. To do so we must abandon the either/or mentality that sees questions of sustainability and development as mutually exclusive. More importantly, the challenge is to make the private car and public transport complementary, not competitive. I have suggested one general way in which this might be done. I would hope that, like those of us who attended the Brisbane conference, present and future members of the Legislative Assembly will see beyond short-term partisan interests to devise a generally cooperative approach to this extremely important issue.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Gentleman): Before I call the next speaker, I would like to draw members’ attention to the gallery, where we have four staff members from the Senate and National Assembly of Pakistan.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (4.28): This government has made a clear commitment to sustainability to ensure that future generations have a lifestyle at least comparative to our own. Meeting the climate change challenge is part of that commitment. It will require leadership by government and an equal commitment by everyone in the community. It will require innovation, a risk management approach and effort directed at building our collective wisdom. We cannot achieve this in isolation. It is a local, regional, national and global responsibility.
The ACT government is currently developing a new ACT climate change strategy and an ACT energy policy. This is in recognition of the fact that most of the ACT’s greenhouse gas emissions—nearly 70 per cent—arise from the use of energy and another 25 per cent arise from the use of energy associated with transport. Therefore, an energy policy that influences the types of energy sources, energy efficiency and energy demand will have an important influence on greenhouse outcomes for the ACT.
The sustainable transport plan and Canberra’s spatial plan will also have an important part to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps the most compelling, but still largely unrecognised, evidence of the lack of even short-term sustainability in Australia
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