News - Planning & development

The original designs for Gungahlin envisaged a community of some 114,000 people and jobs for 23,000. With something like 30,000 people here already, it's all coming together very quickly, and things will only start getting faster with the new suburbs of Harrison filling fast and Franklin and Forde now under construction.

The suburbs are coming first and the places to put the promised 23,000 jobs are disappearing rapidly under row after row of townhouses that threaten to become Canberra's latter day equivalent to the terrace houses of Liverpool or Redfern.

The seemingly instantaneous construction of satellite cities is a phenomenon unique in this country to Canberra. As a young child in early Canberra I recall the creation of Belconnen and Woden, with residential areas rapidly created around high-rise government office blocks plonked in the middle of nowhere. Tuggeranong followed, but without the anchor of the initial employment base, it became a dormitory area, and everyone had to commute elsewhere to their workplace. The domination of Canberra by the car was under way. Only now are some large employers like Centrelink shifting to Tuggeranong. And now in Gungahlin, it seems the planners haven't learnt from that...

With another dormitory area (we're already being called the "new nappy valley") and no jobs locally, we are all forced to make the commute into Belconnen, the city, or through it to the south side. And the arterial roads are clearly not up to the loads they are expected to carry already, let alone what it will be like with another 80,000 people. Roads like William Slim Drive are the regular scene of serious accidents; others like Majura Road and Northbourne Avenue are at a crawl every morning. Is the Gungahlin Drive extension the cure-all? I can't see how when so many other key linkages have been so neglected.

Meanwhile the town centre is sprawling rather than concentrating, with employment essentially limited to just retail and only in the hundreds - not thousands. No sign of any government department relocating yet either.

And the infrastructure that helps turn residents into an actual community seems to be falling far behind the population growth too. The GCC has been calling for recreational infrastructure for several years now, but what have we got? A handful of playgrounds, but plenty of coffee shops! A gym that caters only to part of the population, and golf courses if you are into that. Apart from Yerrabi Park there's nothing for teenagers, and no tennis courts, public swimming pool, or theatre.

We still have no sign of a college, and one of the two nearby alternatives is under threat of closure.

A sad indictment of the lack of recreational infrastructure is the news that the local soccer club has had to restrict the number of teams they form and turn children away because they can't find enough fields to play on.

So I ask you - whenever you get the chance to bend the ear of one of our local elected representatives, please remember to think like a politician and Stay On Message:

"Where's our infrastructure?"

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