Canberry Fair

Broadcast: 18/04/2008

Reporter: Catherine Garrett

CATHERINE GARRETT, PRESENTER: There's a lot of talk in Canberra right now about the importance of community places and spaces versus housing development. Inner city sites are at a premium.

The former Canberry Fair at Watson occupies just such a site. It's prime real estate and its future use is the subject of hot debate between a developer who wants it for low-cost housing and the locals, who say hands off.

If you were living in Canberra through '80s and '90s, chances are you visited Canberry Fair at Watson. During various incarnations, it was known as a fun fair, an entertainment hub famous for its food.

JOHAN KAMMINGA, WATSON COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION: The precinct was a success at the beginning. In the first six months I think it took $1 million. On its opening night on New Year's Eve 1981, the traffic was banked up back to the racecourse.

CATHERINE GARRETT: But today it's a very different story. The site is almost deserted. Most of its colonial replica buildings stand empty and decrepit.

HELEN WOODBRIDGE, WATSON COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION: It's been left to run down and to become... to look like it's useless when in fact there's so much potential here. There's opportunity here to build it up if someone could only see the vision.

CARRIE WRIGHT, AUSTRALIAN HERITAGE VILLAGE CO-ORDINATOR: A lot of the community don't even realise there are going concerns operating here, viable, valuable businesses.

CATHERINE GARRETT: Take in a quick glance over the site and it appears like a ghost town. Yet it still has a care taker and three buildings in use. Print maker Diane Fogwell is in one of them.

DIANNE FOGWELL, ARTIST: This is a unique and unprecedented space for this type of activity. Why would you lose it? Why not build on it? Since I've been here, there's been many people walk in saying, I'd like to open Clancy's, I'd like ot put a photography studio in the other mill building, I'd like to start a restaurant, reinvent the restaurant. There are two commercial kitchens already in the Spit & Roast over there. You have new communities happening very close by. Over the road you've the town houses in Gungahlin, constant development.

JOHAN KAMMINGA: The problem, of course, is that once you don't lease out the buildings like Clancy's Hotel here, of course you're not bringing the customers anymore and it becomes an area which is targeted by thieves and by vandals. There's no reason why it shouldn't be as fantastic as it was before. You could have weekend markets, you could cooking schools. It could have restaurants, as it did before, and cafes. There used to be an antique shop here. People came all the time in the early days. This could all come back.

CATHERINE GARRETT: Some members of the Watson Community Association say businesses have folded from unreasonably high rents and constricted leasing options imposed by the owners as developers circle.

BOB WINNEL, CEO, VILLAGE BUILDING COMPANY: It's just plain false. They tried to make the businesses work at commercially viable rents. There are a lot of people in the community who expect when they put money in the bank, when they do things with their money they expect a reasonable return but somehow they feel that other people should subsidise a commercial operation.

This site does not have commercially viable rents. It cannot operate in the manner it is operating and most of the buildings are empty and have been for a number of years. It's just people without commercial experience trying to impose a non-commercial outcome on people who own property. It doesn't work.

CATHERINE GARRETT: The site is owned by a local business consortium. The Village Building Company wants to use it for medium density affordable housing in the wake of draft changes to the Territory plan.

CARRIE WRIGHT: We're asking the developers to have another look. Simply that. Reappraise their situation. They stand to make $30-plus million out of this. I think that's a very short term view. I think in the long run they can make a lot more money, say over the next two decades, run this place properly. Their return on capital will be enormous.

BOB WINNEL: This is a privately owned site in which there was considerable investment in the commercial operation which failed and went into liquidation. It was then purchased by another group of owners who spent five years trying to keep it going in its current form as a commercial operation. that also failed and today there's one commercial tenant on a pepper corn rental. So the idea of it being able to be kept going with some of its existing uses is actually not achievable. Unless the Government wants to start pouring massive subsidies in, that's not going to work.

The community does not use it. The broader community has made its call. This site is no longer suitable for its present use.

HELEN WOODBRIDGE: Affordable housing is a great idea but not on a site that is offering us something else. There's a real value of community here that's being just looked over and all these lovely trees and open space, there's such a need for that here in the inner north. It's right on the Federal Highway, it's an entry, it's a gateway into Canberra. It's something that could be a great attraction.

CATHERINE GARRETT: An assessment of the site is under way by ACTPla. It will submit recommendations to the ACT Government.

HELEN WOODBRIDGE: We are determined to win on this. And it doesn't mean we're against affordable housing. This is just an inappropriate place to put affordable housing. It's as simple as that. There's something already here!

BOB WINNEL: There's no doubt in my mind we will be overwhelmed with interest from within this area for the homes that will be made available here.

CATHERINE GARRETT: But there'd be no doubt also that you would stand to make quite a lot of money.

BOB WINNEL: Well, can you tell me any business in Australia that operates without making money? I mean, if you can give me the example, I'll go and talk to them, if they're not in liquidation yet. I mean, business is about making money and reinvesting it into the future in more and more facilities. If we didn't make money, I wouldn't be standing here talking to you, we would not have the capacity to build 300 affordable housing on this site. I mean, what you're putting to me is there's something wrong with making money. There is no other town in Australia where I would face an interviewer and be told you're going to make money out of this and something is wrong because any business that doesn't make money does what this business did: goes broke, stops.

CATHERINE GARRETT: And the early photos of Canberry Fair there were courtesy of the ACT Virtual Library and the Canberra Times. The photographers whose names we know were Schultz and Coleen Petch.