Yesterday’s announcement by Planning Minister Simon Corbell reinforces that proposition. Traffic problems are relatively easy to resolve. People need to move from one place to another. Build a road. Build a railway. Put on some more buses. For several years now, many people from Gungahlin have had to drive through a bottleneck every morning to get to places of work. They have been angered by the fact that people from other town centres – Woden, Weston, Belconnen and Tuggeranong – have had the wonders of dual carriageway expressways to the centre and to each other. Belconnen Way, the Tuggeranong Parkway, Hindmarsh Drive and Parkes Way over the past three decades have provided Canberrans’ birthright to the residents of place – unimpeded free-flow car access to wherever they want to go in under 20 minutes. Except to Gungahlin.
Gungahlin, moreover, is a creature of self-government. It was mostly developed post 1989 on a model of giving large tracts of land to developers. Those naïve governments failed to address infrastructure issues in the same way as the relatively cash-rich federal bureaucracy spear-headed by the former National Capital Development Commission. Transport, shopping centres, verges, landscaping, schools, public spaces were given a back seat to the need to flog off land for houses.
The residents of Gungahlin saw themselves as second-class citizens. Corbell realised soon after his fluke election in 1998 that hell hath no fury like a Canberran denied the birthright of driving a car to work.
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