LAST week I hosted a well-attended community forum at the Canberra Deakin Football Club with my colleague Alistair Coe, the Opposition Planning spokesman, to outline to interested residents the approach a future ACT Liberal government would take to redeveloping the Canberra Brickworks and environs.

It provided a timely opportunity for a number of groups to come together to share their views and to hear, first hand, how the Canberra Liberals would approach redevelopment of this area.

It was widely acknowledged that Yarralumla is a special suburb of local and national significance. It is steeped in early Canberra history with sites such as the Brickworks, where bricks for Canberra’s first suburbs were produced, and the Yarralumla nursery, where for many decades trees for all Canberra suburbs were germinated and grown.

It was home for many years to CSIRO’s Division of Forestry and there remains today the nationally significant Westbourne Woods. It is also the address of the Governor-General’s official residence.

The Canberra Liberals have fought the ACT government on legislation such as unnecessarily fast-tracking the Symonston mental health facility, the Project Facilitation Bill and the Capital Metro and University of Canberra Bills. Each of these pieces of legislation has locked the community out from having their fair say on the direction of their city. And Yarralumla is just the latest example of this piecemeal community consultation process.

We need to get the planning decisions right, not just for Yarralumla and Deakin residents, but for all residents in Canberra. What happens in Yarralumla could be a dangerous precedent for elsewhere in our bush capital.

Unfortunately, the Government’s disingenuous consultation has, for years, left many residents with a sour taste in their mouths.

With the Brickworks and Environs Master Plan, the government’s chopping and changing regarding the size, number of units, building heights and overall scale of the development has been ignorant at best and deceptive at worst.

The Canberra Liberals are not and never will be opposed to development in Canberra. However, we would like development that is in character, or complementary, and to a scale that is reasonable.

Therefore, a Canberra Liberals Government would restart the planning consultation process and our draft plan would have the following features:

• We would develop a much smaller section, with a mixture of dwelling types, including townhouses with courtyards and perhaps aged care accommodation.
• We are particularly sceptical about the need for apartments in this area.
• We would support retention of the existing alignment of Cotter Road, Dudley Street and Dunrossil Drive and would propose development within those boundaries.
• We would initially develop a relatively small parcel of land as the first stage and undertake genuine consultation and assessment of the success of that development. The parcel would have natural urban open space around it.
• Concurrent to the development, we would undertake restoration work to the Brickworks and quarry.
• Regarding the planning of the site, rather than excavating to facilitate a grid road network, we would seek to follow the topography of the land with crescents, which is far more consistent with the area and provides a more interesting streetscape.
• Finally, while we would seek to plan for the whole area, we would only seek to do a Territory Plan variation for the first stage, as an assurance to people that a future Liberal government would not go beyond the initial development without assessing what has been done.

The Canberra Liberals are committed to fair planning and proper consultation. It is important that the community is engaged in important decisions such as the redevelopment of Yarralumla.

Steve Doszpot is a Liberal MLA for the seat of Molonglo and a resident of Yarralumla.