The question of what to preserve in Canberra and what to leave to the forces of urban transformation is a surprisingly vexed one for such a young city.
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But a planned capital demands a unique approach to matters of heritage.
A laissez-faire approach - whereby anything can be knocked over, bulldozed, reconstructed and torn down as many times as the market deems fit - is not befitting of a city planned in the national interest.
Equally, a heavily restricted approach where any building or site that has managed to survive should be kept as a monument to the whims and fancies of its own age - all testaments to the eras and changing mores which have influenced Canberra's development - would be utterly unworkable and inappropriate.
At the core of the heritage system in the ACT is a heritage council, made up of experts and members of the community, which has the power to decide against legislated criteria what will be forcibly preserved and what will not.
Heritage Minister Rebecca Vassarotti sacked the council in December 2022 after a review found evidence of unprofessional conduct and a breakdown in the relationship between it and the bureaucrats who work alongside it.
The specifics of those problems have not been made public, but now the government has been warned they could resurface if they do not take more action.
Heritage Council chair Duncan Marshall has sounded the alarm over the need for additional resources. Heritage Minister Rebecca Vassarotti has confirmed she is lobbying for them.
Simply throwing money at the problem of heritage is not going to ensure the ACT has a contemporary, well-functioning heritage system. Additional resources ought to accompany the implementation of findings from the heritage review the government commissioned and the recommendations of the Legislative Assembly inquiry.
Accepting those recommendations without providing the resources required for the heritage unit and council to effectively implement them would be paying mere lip service to the issues of heritage.
Heritage must balance a tricky set of considerations in Canberra. There is a need for more housing. Land supply is ultimately finite, requiring higher levels of urban density. A warming climate requires buildings to adapt rather than be maintained in historical, but practically useless, stasis.
Some opponents of heritage registration see it as a means to new development, particularly housing.
Some proponents of heritage registration see it as a means to stifle new development, the kind they believe is inappropriate or - though perhaps they would not admit it so openly - ugly.
Canberra's heritage system should not be about preserving the old at the expense of the new. Its central task in a city still a completely nascent settlement by the standards of other national capitals is to nudge the population into finding ways to incorporate the physical remnants of their history - from before and after European settlement - into their present.
The capital stands to make inordinate gains from a living, adaptable heritage system, well-resourced and professionally capable. Such a system would ensure the nationally ambitious project to develop Canberra continues to have a sense of its own history and purpose.
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