Page 3511 - Week 11 - Thursday, 19 September 2013
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Perhaps the best summary is from the Treasurer himself, who last year conceded, “Our urban improvement program is in arrears.” We were told that ACT coffers slid $174 million into the red. So they promised Canberrans improved, better services. They had this implausible program which is tantamount to doing nothing at all; it is just simply an empty promise. They said that they had a funding source for the program and the funding source has never come good.
Remember that the actual revenue received in 2011-12 was $8.7 million, down from the predicted $22.4 million. It was $13.7 million shy. In just the September quarter of 2012-13, they received $1.3 million. That was $4.5 million below target. By 31 December, only $2.1 million was received, $7.7 million below target. The expected $23 million was then revised down to $17 million and, of course, we all know that was revised to $19 million, and that was revised down to $17 million.
You cannot have an urban improvement fund that is in arrears and you cannot deliver what you cannot fund. There are a number of issues there that I am sure others will want to have a chat on and will have a view on. I will leave that to them.
The other issue, of course, is the issue of the city in the broad. It is interesting. There is an American group called the Congress for the New Urbanism. Congress for the New Urbanism, in their charter of new urbanism, states:
We advocate the restructure of public policy and that development practice support the following principles: neighbourhoods should be diverse in use and population. Communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car. Cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions. Urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape designs that celebrate local history, climate, ecology and building practice.
In many ways you can agree with all of that. Canberra is a city that could achieve that. In many ways, Canberra in its second century will build on a fabulous foundation that the federal government, particularly the Menzies federal government after 1956, has laid when Menzies established the National Capital Development Commission and set the standard for what a city could be.
Those of us that were here in the 1960s and the 1970s would remember those days. We have now got self-government and there are constraints. But where is the aspiration for the state of the city? How are we going to stop the ACT’s urban environment from decay? You have to take this in the context of a decline in population density. In the late 1960s the average household was about 3.94 people. Now it is about 2½ people. In suburbs with 1,000 houses, you might have had 4,000 people there. Those suburbs may be down to 2,500 people. You have got fewer people in the suburbs with the same level of service being provided. So there has to be a reasonable discussion about population and how we have that urban renewal.
But urban renewal is not going to happen when you put a tax on it. That is what the lease variation charge is. The government is saying, “We want this renewal, but we are going to tax that renewal.” It is counterintuitive. As the Treasurer himself has
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