00:00The fact that we are a landlocked territory and a small landlocked territory in that regard
00:08means that we need to start looking at other alternatives rather than greenfield or new suburbs.
00:15Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion were the original designers of Canberra.
00:20They submitted their plans for the city in 1912, more than 100 years ago.
00:26Since then, the city has grown beyond what they ever imagined.
00:30It was originally designed to be a town with a north and a south between a massive lake
00:36among three mountains that still sit over Canberra today.
00:41Now, some of the town centres are as far as 20 or 30 kilometres away from the lake.
00:47Canberra has grown almost to its limits.
00:49As we speak currently, most of our office space has been taken already
00:55and converted into the residential apartment.
00:57So, we need to retain the core office and commercial space for that dedicated purpose
01:05because we can't just keep building the residential ones and stuff.
01:09Because with the current population itself, we have a huge demand on housing.
01:15You know, with the job opportunities, with the health facilities, it's already lacking
01:22and there's a lot of delay in surgeries and all this, you know, medical treatment
01:27that people need to go through it.
01:29And if you look into the infrastructure, that's kind of a nightmare.
01:32As we, you know, currently we can see, the roads are not duplicated.
01:37The infrastructure is not going to be capable of handling more people
01:41and the transport, you know, again, that's going to fail.
01:45Here, I'm standing in the driveway of a duplex.
01:49There's a small house at the front of this block and at the back.
01:52Together, they house more than six people.
01:55This is one of the most controversial planning changes the ACT government has made
02:00in the past five years.
02:02It's called the Missing Middle Reform and it's part of an attempt to infill
02:07an existing suburb that are close to the CBD, such as this one in Ainslie.
02:12The ACT government and other bodies are trying to come up with solutions
02:15to fix the territory's population problem.
02:18In the next 40 years, the Australian Capital Territory will be home
02:22to more than 800,000 people.
02:25But right now, there's nowhere for them to live.
02:28And the other part to this is we need to seriously look at having a more dense city
02:35and we know the government's working on that with the Missing Middle.
02:39We need the community on board with it as well.
02:42And there's still a lot of community backlash or lack of support to some extent
02:49for a more denser Canberra.
02:52I know some of the comments in the Missing Middle consultation were around the need
02:57to have a backyard and that, you know, every family needs to have a backyard,
03:02but we're running out of land.
03:04And the research shows that if we have really good public open spaces,
03:10so really good infrastructure, whether it be, you know, not just open spaces,
03:15but good public realm where people can use,
03:17then living in apartments, living in smaller dwellings is not a bad outcome at all.
03:23We can still remain true to our roots as the bush capital
03:28and still also be a modern city.
03:32So that's the wake of the city.
03:34So thank you very much.
03:35So thank you for having a good大哥one and his family.
Comments