Page 4084 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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Drive extension was being built and being proposed. If you believed what was being said when the Gungahlin Drive extension was being built, you would think that this was some sort of ecological paradise where they were trying to build this road. You would think that it was some sort of untouched rainforest, when clearly that was not the case. This had been used and used again previously in the life of Canberra, yet we have these arguments.
Unfortunately, what do we do instead of agreeing to a position that we can all agree to, which is that when we develop as a city we should do so sustainably, we should reserve open space and we should recognise ecological values. That is why we have vast tracks of nature reserve. All Canberrans support that. They support that concept. But to take that a step further and to say, “No go; no-go zone,” has serious implications.
Those implications are now being felt. They are being felt by people who want to send their kid to the local Catholic high school in Gungahlin. They are concerned that this delay will not just be a year: it may never get off the ground. And those who are looking to get into the housing market will see that the restriction of another area of development potentially will make it even more expensive and just that little bit tougher for young Canberra families to buy into the Canberra market.
This kind of policy that the Greens are proposing and are putting forward has implications. It is well and good for us all to accept that we should develop the city sustainably; we all accept that. But the Greens have gone much further than that now. They are putting housing affordability at risk; they are putting the provision of local facilities in Gungahlin at risk. That is a cause of great concern to the community, and they need to be honest about that. They need to be honest about that when people come and see them about housing affordability. When they come and see them about the provision of facilities in their area, they should say, “We blocked it.” They should be honest enough to say that.
These policy extremes have implications. They have ramifications for the community. We can talk about motherhood all we like. We can talk about the fact that we all support the environment, because we all do. But we are always looking to balance the environment with the needs of the community, with the needs of family in Canberra. We are going to continue to fight so that that balance is restored to a reasonable one that allows those houses to be built, that allows that high school to be built and that allows Gungahlin to continue to grow.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (3.58): I thank Mr Corbell and Ms Bresnan for their appreciation of the realities of life on this planet. The realities of life on this planet are that we only in fact have one planet; therefore, we must live our life in a way that we can—all of us—coexist on this planet. Unfortunately, Mr Seselja seems to have not grasped this basic ecological context. Resources are finite and we do only have one planet. As the people of the ACT are using more, as both Mr Corbell and Ms Bresnan pointed out, than it would be feasible for all of the people on this planet to use, we have an issue that we need to address in the ACT. It is not simply a question, as Mr Seselja is trying to say, of asking: do we want to develop one part of Canberra or another part? That is a relevant part of the equation; it is not the whole part of the equation.
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