Page 1019 - Week 03 - Thursday, 23 March 2017
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CIT is actively seeking opportunities to provide a community campus in the Woden Town Centre. The proposed move to Woden would provide CIT with a more modern learning environment and have an advantage of being more accessible for the public and closer to public transport.
That is absolutely spot on. This has been done in Tuggeranong. I understand—Madam Speaker, you would know if I am correct—that it has been a success there. Given that that is the case, could we replicate it in Woden? There are students in Woden. I am sure they would benefit from it.
Also along those lines, the former CIT site is basically fairly empty. We need to see some community consultation and some thoughts about what should happen to this precinct. It has been suggested often that it should be a health precinct. That seems to me to make an awful lot of sense, given that the Woden valley hospital is there. I am showing my age here. It is Canberra Hospital that is adjacent to it. I do not claim to know the answers for sure, except to know that this is a good site, an important site for Woden, and it needs to be sensitively developed.
Talking about sensitive development, community facilities are an area where Woden is sadly lacking. With the closure of the CIT campus, the state of the Woden pool, no child or family centre in Woden or Weston and no arts precinct, Woden does not have a community hub. The situation at present is that community groups in Woden have to meet in one of the three licensed clubs where they are competing for limited space. They have to meet amongst alcohol and pokies, which is not always conducive to those clubs.
The forward estimates in the 2012-13 budget contained half a million dollars over two years for a feasibility and design study for a community hub. That is nearly three years ago. As far as I know, there has been no public sighting of any outcomes from this. There have not been consultations and updates.
The community in Woden deserves a plan of what is going forward for community facilities. The same goes for sporting facilities. I am very pleased that, from a football point of view, things are going forward with Phillip oval and the complex at Melrose high. That is really good, but the ice-skating rink is clearly not in good shape. There has been a commitment to a feasibility study, which will clearly end up with an ice-skating rink somewhere else, despite the fact the Territory Plan has the only possible use for that site being ice-skating.
Again, as far as the pool goes, there is a commitment by the government to a pool in Molonglo, which leads me to the question: what is going to happen to the pool site in Phillip? It would be good for Woden to have a statement as to where sporting facilities are going in Woden, given those two key sporting facilities would appear to be departing. I think the basketball courts have just been demolished—I am trying to get my time lines right—by the Southern Cross Club. Clearly, the gymnasium that was run by the CIT is no longer being used.
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