Page 1420 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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Our city’s planning must integrate the city, suburbs and town centres in a coherent way. The ACT Greens have advocated for local area planning for group and town centres so that these facilities retain their vibrancy and viability and continue to meet the needs of their local communities as they grow and change. The 2008 Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement put neighbourhood planning on the agenda, and we are pleased this has led to master plans for Erindale, Pialligo, Tharwa, Hall and Oaks Estate amongst others being developed.
Of course, over the last Assembly we also worked with the government to ensure that a system of prioritisation for master planning was developed so that areas which will be impacted on by significant local change will undertake a master planning process to manage that growth in a practical and productive way in consultation with the local community. It is important that the community is engaged and involved in this planning process in a genuine way.
I welcome the community consultation on the city to the lake project that has just been launched and encourage all Canberrans to learn more about the plans and have their say. It is very important that the community understands that the proposed city to the lake project is not one that will happen in the short term and is not something being thrust upon the community; rather, it is time for us to bring the community into a broader discussion about the future needs of our city. It will also give us the opportunity to look into rectifying planning problems created in the past before we continue to grow our city, perhaps in a trajectory that is not actually where we want to go.
In relation to the last part of Ms Porter’s motion—government expenditure on essential infrastructure—the Greens could not agree more. We need to ensure that the needs of our community are being met with appropriate infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads and paths, public transport, public housing and so on. We also need to ensure the government is able to fund people to operate the right programs and services for these key pieces of infrastructure.
We are, of course, going to have to think about the likely impacts on the ACT budget if the federal government changes and our economy slows off the back of that. That will raise serious questions about our capability to invest in some of these sorts of services. We also need to ensure the infrastructure we build is efficient. It needs to be efficient to maintain as well as being environmentally efficient. It needs to be infrastructure we know will still be useful over the long term. Infrastructure that will not use too much energy to run long into the future is what this city needs. We know the technology exists and that the knowledge and expertise is there. Now is the time to start building this kind of infrastructure. And the infrastructure needs to make sense within the context in which it is located; it needs to improve the city as a whole.
That is why we support the community debate around the proposed city to the lake project. We want sustainable infrastructure that enhances our city. That is why, for example, we are pushing ahead with the commitment to building light rail, despite the commentary Mr Coe just gave. There is much recognition that this is the sort of infrastructure that will be for the benefit of the city for the longer term, will provide
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