Page 3731 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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has spread across that city over a period of time. And they had to start somewhere, which is what this government is seeking to do. The partnership between the Greens and the Labor Party is seeking, at that fork in the road, to say, “Actually, we want to build a good future for this city and we want to make decisions now that people will benefit from over an extended period of time.”
Portland did that. Their light rail network continues to be added to and to grow as the city grows. That is the sort of choice that we are seeking to make for Canberra at this juncture. Can we build a better future for the residents of this city and not condemn them to both the urban planning disaster and the financial disaster of simply having an unlimited focus on one mode of transport, the private motor vehicle?
Portland provides us with a real, living case study of what is possible and the sort of decisions we can make, particularly when we contrast that to places like Sydney. It is one example. There are many others around the world. I have cited a couple of times recently the recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit which highlighted that eight of the top 10 most livable cities in the world have light rail networks. That again underlines the fact that this is about making people-friendly cities that are not condemned to being locked into this sort of—
Mr Hanson: The most livable city in the world doesn’t have a light rail system.
MR RATTENBURY: The point is that—
Mr Hanson: You can’t have the argument both ways.
MR RATTENBURY: Mr Hanson is interjecting away, because that is how he does things in this place. But the point is that we have a choice here. We can choose which way we want this city to go into the future, and that is what this government is doing. I commented recently that voters want governments to take long-term decisions, and that is what we are doing here. We are taking decisions for the future of this city.
Dr Bourke in his motion touched on a range of points, and I think he made some very good ones. The urban renewal offered by developing light rail is a very important point. It is urban renewal that cannot be delivered through the sort of planning policies that the Canberra Liberals are suggesting or the business-as-usual scenario. We know that light rail has been proven to deliver a range of urban renewal that both the private motor vehicle and buses simply do not deliver. There is an additional factor that comes with having a fixed rail line that increases the level of urban renewal and urban densification. That means we do not need to keep spreading the city further and further out; we can offer a range of housing alternatives closer to the centre of the city that will benefit us in terms of giving people more options and also in terms of ensuring that the urban spread simply does not continue. We can seek to limit the costs that go with that urban spread as well.
Putting infrastructure into further and further areas of our city involves a great deal of expense. Senator Seselja recently suggested we should spread to the west side of the Murrumbidgee River. We have not seen any endeavours to cost the sort of infrastructure that will be necessary for that, but there will need to be at least two new
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