Page 4974 - Week 13 - Thursday, 12 November 2009
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consider that simply informing stakeholders of its proposal, rather than actively engaging in a two-way process, is sufficient consultation.
The NCA has problems in general with community consultation, but the ASIO building has been a particularly spectacular example of poor consultation, or poor process altogether. The ASIO building has been in the pipeline since the 2006-07 federal budget. And it went, of course, through the relevant approvals necessary for such federal buildings on national capital designated land. That is to say, it went through a number of quiet internal processes but with minimal public consultation. Even the NCA have had very little to say about it.
The project was part of the suite of projects conceived by the NCA to kick-start the Constitution Avenue redevelopment, and the new headquarters for ASIO and the Office of National Assessments was funded in the budget, as I mentioned. Despite the fact that this proposal has been on the table for three years, the first that most of the ACT residents were aware of this building was a few months ago when work actually started. Of course, unfortunately, it started by knocking down a few trees and subsequently it has not been a few trees; it has been hundreds of trees and there is now a large hole in the ground. There is now another matter on which there has not been a huge amount of public consultation: what to do with the contaminated waste which was on the site, because it was an old dump for things including asbestos.
One of the biggest issues with the ASIO project is, of course, the site. The ASIO building by definition is not a building which is going to have a large amount of public interaction and particularly a large amount of interaction with the parliament and the rest of the public service. So there is not an ipso facto case that it really has to be in the parliamentary triangle. But if you look at Canberra as a whole, Canberra was designed so that it would have a series of somewhat self-sufficient town centres, a series of town centres which had significant employment in them. That is what the Y plan was all about. Gungahlin is a town centre which has no government departments in it.
Mr Coe: Shame.
MS LE COUTEUR: I have to agree with Mr Coe: shame about this. The ASIO building, given that it does not have a close connection with parliament house, would seem to be an excellent possibility for relocation in Gungahlin, and I am confident that the good folk of Gungahlin would welcome it with open arms and hearts. However, as we are all aware, the good folk of Campbell, the residents, are far from welcoming it with open arms. There have been a series of questions in The Canberra Times and pronouncements by various federal politicians on the subject.
Basically there has been a real lack of scrutiny on this. When the Greens Senator Bob Brown raised this issue of scrutiny in the Senate this year he discovered that the project had slipped through without any public input except for a brief public consultation period through the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. That is a good act and I am not in any way against it. But it seems very bizarre that this is the primary method of public consultation on what is a large building in the middle of Canberra.
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