Page 1458 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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Look at the area between the ferry terminal and the National Museum; the land is grossly underutilised. There is a great opportunity to give people more opportunity to use that land, to have it as a place for cafes and restaurants, so that people can enjoy this fantastic amenity by a lakeside. It will provide opportunities for both formal and informal recreation. Informal recreation like cycling, jogging and walking can still occur. Picnics and all that sort of thing still can occur. But you can have more formal recreation, things like a swimming facility or other forms of recreation that bring people and activity down to enjoy that fantastic amenity by our lake foreshore.
What was most concerning to me about those comments, though, was the suggestion that the most valuable use of the land is as a car park. And I have to say, this is an incredibly short-sighted view of the way land like that should be utilised into the future. Car parking is important. We know Canberrans always express a view about car parking and how that should be best managed. But prime land like that should not be used as a car park.
Let me put it this way: there is an enormous opportunity cost if we are simply saying that this land should be available only for surface car parking. Go and have a look at how well those car parks are currently utilised. Go and have a look at how that land is currently utilised. The car parks are not utilised fully. Even during a working day, they are not utilised fully.
I would have to say that there is a much better use for beautiful land beside our lake than to turn it into surface car parks or to keep it as surface car parks. And if we could have more people living in that location, enjoying the amenity of that location through restaurants or cafes, boardwalks, recreational spaces, let us try to do that. It is this government that has put it on the program. Our agenda is to make this happen.
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Doszpot): Mr Hanson, that is sufficient, thank you.
MR CORBELL: We also have to look at how development on the lake foreshore is consistent with the city centre as a whole and that the city has significant potential to continue to grow into the future. As part of that, we are undertaking very detailed work on the development of the capital metro project. The capital metro project will give us significant capacity to move more people in and out of the city centre. It can act as an activity hub and drive development around it, both in terms of the terminus in the city centre and how that infrastructure moves south of the lake to connect other parts of the city. This highlights a government that is getting on with the job of the long-term planning of our city, and I encourage Canberrans to have their say on this important project. (Time expired.)
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella) (4.01): I would like to thank Ms Porter for moving this important motion today. I am going to concentrate on my area, Brindabella, and speak specifically to point 2(d) in the motion, which talks about continuing to roll out consultation on master plans for our town centres.
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