Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate a speech on behalf of Senator Lundy.

Leave granted.

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

There is no doubt that it has been a very big week for my home city of Canberra.

First, it was the satisfaction and delight of vet another premiership (after some nail-biting final minutes) for Lauren Jackson, National Hirst, coach Carrie Graf and the mighty Canberra Transact Capitals—now officially, fittingly, the most successful team ever in the WNBL.

And then, over the last few days, the whole town has been abuzz with 97th birthday celebration excitement. While the Grand Event, on 12 March 2013, is still 3 years away, this has not stopped the ACT Government of Jon Stanhope, in close collaboration with the Rudd Government, ensuring that we all enjoy the subtle symphonies of the build-up. Anticipation is growing.

Last Friday, at a VIP breakfast, the Chief Minister formally announced the name of the Centenary’s native plant, a superb Correa cultivar, of impeccable breeding fines, to be known as the ‘Canberra Bells’.

At the same function, the Centenary of Canberra’s remarkable Creative Director, Robyn Archer, introduced us to the new and striking Centenary logo (the result of a creative collaboration between young designers across Australia and His Excellency, Mr Michael Bryce), and she also drew our attention to the bulging 2010 Canberra Festival program of recent weeks, as well as a selection of the innovative commemoration events to be rolled out in the coming 12 months—consciousness raising events to ensure we maximise the number of Canberrans getting actively involved.

The challenge, of course, for the ACT and the Commonwealth Governments is to pique the interest of as many Australians as possible throughout the country—to alert them to both the importance and the genuine relevance of the celebrations. The national significance of the events, and personalities, and history being celebrated.

I am confident that this will happen, but only if all of us, in the parliament and in Canberra, are motivated to play a part in building a deeper understanding of Canberra as the nation’s capital—primarily through its rich and utterly compelling history.

Fortunately, we have the luxury of a suite of Centenary years, 2008 to 2013, to make this happen. Time enough to get to know some of our most significant Federation founders, and their more momentous decisions—a number of which continue to profoundly affect us to this day.

Our over-riding goal should be to link the best of our best to the present and future.

I am sure that most of my fellow Senators have an inkling of, say, King O’Malley’s controversial profile as iconoclastic Minister for Home Affairs in Andrew Fisher’s second, impressively over-achieving Labor Government a century ago.

Perhaps you are also passingly familiar with the classic footage of Lady Denman, the Governor-General’s wife, atop the Foundation Stones podium, during that dusty autumn of 1913, pronouncing Canberra’s name, with the accent on the ‘Can’. Last Friday’s ACTTV Stateline program, catering explicitly to keen local-community interest, ran a few snippets of Raymond Longford’s historic footage of the Naming Ceremony.

But the brute fact, the shaming fact perhaps, is that, until recently, very few of us have been able to go much beyond a few isolated titbits of national capital history.

The Centenary years are thankfully changing all that. Many of us have been plugging more deeply into the history. We now have a working understanding of the protracted yet highly entertaining `Battle of the Sites’ saga when, 100 years ago, a host of Australian towns and cities aspired to be what one writer called ‘the treasure house of a nation’s heart’.

We now know that it was the option called ‘Yass-Canberra’ that won out in late 1908, and that it was Charles Scrivener, by all accounts the most brilliant surveyor of his generation, who was tasked with finding the specific location for the federal city within the ‘Yass-Canberra’ region.

Scrivener and his talented team got the job done with consummate professionalism during 1909, but the intended Federal Capital Territory—from 1938, the Australian Capital Territory—now needed its precise boundaries. It required, first, a gift of land from the NSW State Government to the national government. And it needed an appropriate mechanism to enable the gifted land to be governed by the Commonwealth—an Administration Act—which ultimately became legislation in late 1910.

The year 1910 in fact assumes a noble place in the larger national capital story, for it was almost exactly 100 years ago that the ultra-challenging border survey, to delineate the FCT borders, was commenced. In country that required he and his team to be crawling on all fours on occasion, up and down cliff faces, Percy Lempriere Sheaffe commenced the survey at Mt Coree, in the nearby Brindabellas, in late May 1910.

The survey evolved into an epic, 5-year adventure, yet even a cursory read of the original manuscript material underscores an issue for our Federation founders that is as relevant today as then: the crucial importance of water. Water dominated inter-government deliberations on the capital throughout 1909 and for most of 1910.

When Mr Surveyor Scrivener, as he was rather stuffily called, sent his Report to the Minister for Home Affairs in May 1909, the first sub-heading in the milestone document is simply entitled: ‘Water Supply’. Scrivener proceeds to go into the topic in near-encyclopaedic fashion, armed with every imaginable statistic related to the catchments of the Molonglo, Murrumbidgee, Queanbeyan and Cotter Rivers.

Scrivener’s Report soon became the catalyst for a busy exchange between the NSW Premier and the Prime Minister, as both men strove for advantage to ensure acceptable water supply for their respective constituencies.

It is hardly surprising that when the Fisher Government published the ‘Information, Conditions and Particulars’ for Canberra’s international design competition in 1911 that potential applicants were advised that ‘water supply must be of sufficient magnitude to place the question of volume at all seasons and purity beyond doubt’.

It is not hard to empathise with, and learn from, our forebears. Both the Rudd and Stanhope Governments, fully engaged with the substance of the irrefutable science in the 2007 Report of the Intergovernmental Pane! on Climate Change, continue to ensure that water is a fundamental priority in the thinking for our inland national capital.

Accordingly, in the last few months there has been a succession of important announcements to progress the water agenda.

In November 2009, ACTEW and the Stanhope Government started construction of the Cotter Dam extension on the western outskirts of Canberra, easily the biggest building project in the ACT since the construction of the new Parliament House. The Cotter extension, a vital project for the ACT and surrounding regions, will make certain that residents of the ACT have adequate and safe drinking supplies—‘purity beyond doubt’, as the founders so memorably put it—even if climate change leads to longer and more severe droughts.

In December 2009, the Environment Minister Peter Garrett and I announced a $2.9 million project for the Australian National Botanic Garden;—honouring a carefully considered election commitment of the Rudd Government to construct a pipeline from Lake Burley Griffin that will deliver 170 million litres of non-potable water to the Gardens each year. It should be operational sometime next summer.

As Senators are aware, this is a project very dear to my heart both as a resident of the ACT and as a firm supporter of the seminal cultural role of the national ‘treasure house’ institutions in the education of our nation.

The beautiful Botanic Gardens, the living collection of which represents an extraordinary one third of Australia’s plant diversity, is a key part of the umbrella of national institutions in Canberra—an umbrella which was seriously under-emphasised, even undermined during the Howard Government years. Some were let run down, but none so seriously as the Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Fortunately, the winds of change are blowing for the better. It has been my privilege to host two forums over the last 12 months which have drawn government and public attention to the neglect. The new Director of the Gardens, Dr Judy West, has welcomed what she has called a ‘fantastic start’ to a new future.

One might use these same words to describe the situation at yet another cultural treasure of the national capital, the Albert Hall, which only last week celebrated its 82nd birthday amidst a gratifying surge of historically savvy community support. It has been well-documented that the Albert Hall endured a crisis period during the dying days of the Howard Government, when the National Capital Authority’s potentially disastrous Draft Amendment 53 proposed significant built development within the Albert Hall’s quality heritage precinct.

Community fury—direct, purposeful action—led to the eventual withdrawal of the ill-considered Amendment. It is one of life’s pleasures for me, driving to work down Commonwealth Avenue, to witness the elegant refurbishment work now going on at Albert Hall, courtesy of some $2.73 million in heritage funding from the ACT Government, topped up with an additional $500,000 in federal funding.

When King O’Malley, as Minister for Home Affairs, addressed the House of Representatives chamber on 9 November 1910, he had become an outspoken advocate of the Canberra option. He called it ‘a new Eden’, and recalled the first time he viewed the Limestone Plains from the vantage point of Mt Pleasant, the hill behind Duntroon.

With characteristic flourish, O’Malley said that ‘ ... Moses, thousands of years ago, as he gazed down on the promised land, saw no more beautiful panoramic view than I did ... the site of the Federal city, like that of Rome, is located on seven hills, and must remind travellers of that ancient Italian city which was the capital of the world’s civilisation. l shall not say that such will be the case with the Federal city’, O’Malley went on, ‘but 1 believe it will be the capital for many centuries of civilisation in this southern hemisphere’.

Phew. In the build-up to Canberra’s Centenary birthday, while Senators might not be prepared to go the full distance of O’Malley’s euphoric vision of the future, we have been entrusted as the latest generation of custodians to look after this city, the finest capital city-in-the-landscape in the world. Canberra’s Centenary birthdays are a timely reminder of the obligations of that custodianship—one that I hope all federal parliamentarians will relish. We all have a story to tell.