Crispin Hull

He came around the front of his desk for the interview, rather than talk across it. He has a fair amount of space at his offices in Mugga Way. He is the chief executive and national director (practice) of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. However, he is more interested in what you do with space than how much of it you have.

Australia, of course, has a lot of space. But as most of the population is packed into the south-east corner it is becoming more precious. The pressure is on for higher density living.

Peck sees a danger in this.
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It might sound like astral travelling, but when the members of the Republic Advisory Committee flew across the ACT border yesterday they entered a body politic under the Crown.

We know this because it says so in Section 7 of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act. For all intents and purposes that Act is the Constitution of the ACT. It is as important in the running of ACT affairs as the Federal Constitution is for the running of Federal matters.

The ACT’s Constitution could provide a very useful model for the committee as it looks for options for an Australian republic. The reason is that the ACT Constitution avoids nearly all of the ephemeral and uncertain elements that imbue the Federal Constitution.
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A dispute between the ACT Executive and an Assembly committee could delay the creation of a separate ACT Public Service.

At present ACT public servants are in the Federal service. Last year the Federal Government made it clear it wanted the ACT to create its own service and agree to help pay for the transition.

The Assembly set up a committee in June to inquire into the change. In June it asked for a private briefing from senior ACT bureaucrats. Yesterday the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, wrote to the committee’s chair, Tony de Domenico, refusing the briefing until after the Government put its submission to the committee on August 13.
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The Member for Canberra, John Langmore, has made a couple of pertinent points about betterment tax in this paper and on ABC radio in the past week.

The debate flared again a couple of weeks ago when I had the impertinence to suggest that the ACT Government would not get much sympathy in its attempt to balance the Budget while it continued to give developers a 50 per cent rebate on betterment tax.

The debate began in 1913, so my contribution was hardly new or original. In 1913, at the founding of the capital, it was decided to have a leasehold system to prevent land speculation. Ever since, administrators, politicians, developers and speculators have done their damnest to pervert leasehold either so they could line their own pockets with the increases in value that come from changes to more profitable uses of land or out of the honest but misguided view that land developers need economic encouragement.
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A wire security fence surrounds a patch of the carpark of old Royal Canberra Hospital on Acton Peninsula. A yellow sign says: Site for Hospice.

The peninsula is like a scene from The Day of the Triffids. It is a weekday afternoon. There should be people, noise and traffic so close to the city centre. Instead there is an eerie quiet. Large empty buildings are still intact with signs to direct people and cars. It is as if the people had fled some impending terror.

From the point of the peninsula you feel you can touch Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The busy late afternoon traffic scurries home from the office to the television news. Parliament House is just there. It is the centre of Canberra, but someone has cast a taboo across it. It is a sacred site.
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The ACT has the advantage of being a new polity. It can learn from the mistakes of other states and territories.

It can learn from Victoria and South Australia: do not get into debt. It can learn from Western Australia: do not sell your government to “”mates”. It can learn from the Northern Territory: the Federal tit can dry up. It can learn from the Fraser Federal Government: do not indulge in the political cop out of across-the-board cuts.

Then again, it can fall into the same mistakes.
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QUEEN’S Counsel once did the work of the Crown for nothing. That is how they got the title. It doesn’t happen now, of course: they charge.

This week Lloyd Waddy, QC, however, was going back to the traditional role of Queen’s Counsel: arguing the Crown case for no charge.

Waddy, a founding member of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, argues with the flourish and language that you might expect from a director of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, without straying too far from logic and fact.
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The conclusions of an inquiry into a North Canberra redevelopment have been rejected as illogical and outrageous by the Canberra Conservation Council.

Some of the conclusions into Section 22, Torrens Street, Braddon, were leaked to The Canberra Times and published yesterday. The full report will be tabled in the Legislative Assembly this week.

The council’s president, Jacqueline Rees, said the inquiry, headed by former Administrative Appeals Tribunal president Robert Todd, had ruled inadmissible any queries or statements related to possible improprieties and had refused to contemplate any evidence relating to it, saying it was beyond its terms of reference.
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The reason the Labor and Liberal Members of the Assembly agreed to an inquiry into Section 22 was to give those named by Independent MLA Michael Moore a chance to clear their names.

In the earlier debate Mr Moore said there was “”a smell” involving departmental and developer “”mates” who drank at the Kingston pub. He named one of the principals of Bobundra Pty Ltd, the Sector 22 developer, Peter Phillips, who is also the chair of the ACT Electricity and Water, and the secretary of the Department of Land Planning and Environment, Jeff Townsend, among others.

Those named have got every right to be aggrieved by this inquiry. Very simply, they were not given a chance to clear their names. Mr Todd skipped the issue. It seems incredible that he has narrowed his inquiry to planning issues when it is obvious from the most cursory reading of the Assembly debate that the main reason for the inquiry was to give them that chance. I believe both Mr Phillips and Mr Townsend pressed him to widen his inquiry so they could clear their names.
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Some of the planning procedures in the ACT were “bordering on the bizarre”, an inquiry into a North Canberra redevelopment proposal has found.

The findings of the inquiry by former Administrative Appeals. Tribunal member Robert Todd were tabled in the Legislative Assembly yesterday. They prompted the Minister for Land, Environment and Planning,

Bill Wood, to confirm a review of some provisions of the Land Act and to improve the consultation process. Mr Todd was commissioned by the Assembly to inquire into difficulties surrounding a redevelopment proposal at Torrens Street, Braddon.
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