On its face the Acton-Kingston land swap should go ahead. The Acton peninsula, jutting into the lake so close to Canberra’s political heartland, should ultimately be for a great national purpose. The Kingston foreshore, near residential and retail sites and facing sunny north across the lake, is much more suited for territory purposes.
Last week, Chief Minister Kate Carnell rightly condemned the year’s delay caused by the ACT Legislative Assembly’s Planning and Environment Committee inquiry and the fact that even after a year the committee issued on an interim report. Moreover, the committee appeared to do little more than collect submissions and synthesise them. There is little evidence of any searching questioning of the submissions. Small wonder, then, that the ACT Electricity and Water put in an ambit claim on the cost of removing some of its facilities from the Kingston site.
Mrs Carnell pointed out that a study into contamination had already been commissioned, presumably through the Interim Authority for Kingston Foreshore and that the clean-up of the site was a mater for further negotiation with the Commonwealth.
That said, Mrs Carnell’s “”crash or crash through” language in her response to the committee’s report may cause a backlash later. It would have been better to have pointed out that the serious concerns of the committee were already being attended to in a considered way by the foreshore authority. It might have been understandable to condemn the delay, especially in light of federal government job cut-backs in the ACT, but down the track this will only lead to accusations that any Government response to issues like contamination and economic viability are tainted with bias.
The land swap will not be easy. In some respects the committee, the government and to a lesser extent the authority have got it wrong. Their view seems to be that all the practical impediments needs to be cleared before anyone thinks of preliminary, let alone detailed, design. Questions about what should be done with present tenants, contamination, federal-territory finances and so on, should be worked out before anyone put forward a vision. The trouble with this approach is that the final vision gets compromised by whatever arrangements are made with respect to the minutiae. It would be better to have a vision and an ultimate outcome on the table and to ensure that the small-level arrangements … short or medium term … do not compromise them.
In town planning, it is necessary to take the long view. If a building is out of place, if a tenant is using land in an inappropriate way, if some roads are aligned badly or whatever, the planner should take the long view. Ultimately, these things get cleared, moved or changed for the long-term benefit.
To date, Acton has been used for a hospital and ancillary health functions and Kingston has been used for semi-industrial uses. It would be clearly better in the long-term for the delightful Kingston site to be better used and for the industrial functions to be moved to the flat industrial sites away from Canberra’s main waterway. It would be better in the long term for Acton to be used for some major national purpose. It could have been ear-marked for a major national hospital, but that opportunity is now passed.
The important point now is for the main purposes to be set out and that no change in interim uses be allowed that compromise those long-term goals. To a large extent the authority had this task in hand. Indeed, there is little to stop a commencement of the redevelopment of the Kingston site as soon as the contamination issues is dealt with. It is not insurmountable. Hundreds of sites with much worse contamination have been rehabilitated around the world.
It will be important for the Government to ensure that selfish short-term interests do not stymie what is fundamentally a good idea. Indeed, if there had not been a hospital on Acton and if there had not been a federal government printery at Kingston it is difficult to imagine that at self-government in 1989 that Acton would have been designated territory land or Kingston designated federal land. Temporary land use dictated the outcome, but long-term geography dictates that the designations be reversed.
Now that the Federal Government has wisely abandoned its predecessor’s idea of splitting the National Museum into an Aboriginal site at Acton and a do-nothing-about-the-rest site at Yarramundi, there is less urgency about clearing the Acton site.
None the less, there is a degree of urgency about moving on Kingston. Construction is not a panacea for the economic woes beset upon Canberra by federal expenditure cuts, but every bit counts. The Assembly committee’s report should not prevent that. A competition for an ideas concept should go ahead. Once the goals are set, there will be less room for compromising them with interim deals with current land users and at least a start can begin. In the meantime the exact extent of the contamination and the real cost of ACTEW relocation needs defining.