In this address I wish to outline the aims and objectives of the Coalition Government's agenda for our capital city.

It is important for me first of all to put on record my thanks to the Institute for the work that it has done to assist us in progressing elements of the "Agenda 21" program. We were determined from the beginning that design excellence was going to be a criteria for all of our projects, so we called on the Institute for its advice and its active participation. As I will be explaining with one of the projects that is first off the drawing board, the new Exhibition Centre for Melbourne, we relied very much on the work of John Castle, President of the Institute, in giving us advice and making sure that we had independent input. I look forward to the involvement and comment of the Institute over coming years.

Through "Agenda 21" we are saying the time has come to formally recognise that the capital city is uniquely important to the destiny of the State. The capital is something that all Victorians have a share of ownership in, and it is certainly something that we have an economic interest in assisting.

Classically missing from past management of our State was a positive focus on the capital city.

We are therefore implementing an agenda to secure Melbourne's future. The trillion dollars of historic public and private infrastructure in Melbourne must be fostered, encouraged and expanded. Not simply left in a freefall position where it loses value, loses attractiveness and our capital city falls away. That is obviously not good for Victoria.

There are four strategic goals that the Government wants to achieve. They are aims and ambitions that I think are realistic:

1. enhance Melbourne's attractiveness as a lively cosmopolitan centre with a vibrant retail, entertainment and cultural focus.
2. strengthen the City's key financial and commercial activities.
3. expand the capital city as a base for trade, for advanced manufacturing, for research.
4. promote Melbourne as a showcase of world class events and festivals, as the home of the arts, sports and conventions within Australia and within the Region.

We can achieve those four aims, if we work now to get some projects moving for this decade.

Of course there is a broader motivation for achieving those aims; that is, if we don't take this path then we will be an economic basket case. We cannot simply acknowledge the problems of the 1980s and believe that somehow they will just go away. We have to drive ourselves out of the 1980s and all the problems that were part of that period.

This historic background is a depressing one, but it is worth remembering when you are considering a vision for the future.

The first background problem in this area is the 'joy' I had on October 3, as the new Minister for Major Projects, inheriting no Capital Works Initiatives Budget, in the middle of a property recession, and, worse than that, uncovering the true legacy left by our predecessors!

You might ask yourself, how did Victoria actually pay for the cost of Tricontinental; how did it meet the cost of the VEDC, the Victorian Investment Corporation, Workcare, etc. As one of the key chapters of the Audit Commission Report commissioned by Alan Stockdale indicated, the way our predecessors catered for the losses over the last ten years was to raid the Capital Works Budget. Be it your local school that did not get the maintenance it expected or the key capital projects that simply got deferred. That is where the cuts were really made, not in recurrent expenditure, but in capital expenditure. As that Audit Commission Report (which as been independently supported) indicates, we were spending an appallingly small amount of money on Capital Works as a State Government.

I happen to believe the provision of infrastructure is one of the principal responsibilities of a State Government, particularly during a recession. If nothing else, it is smart for us to build during a recession when we can secure affordable new assets and when we can ensure that we take up the slack in the market place. We have not had those funds, so the first rich legacy we inherited was almost no Capital Works Budget and, worse than that, a ten year reduction in Capital Works spending which meant we had a lot to catch up on.

The second background problem was the grossly mismanaged and permanently delayed projects we inherited. A classic example was Labor's much promised Museum project. Another was the World Congress Centre, with due respect to those who designed it, is one of the worst buildings Melbourne has seen since the start of this century. It is a tragedy that our predecessors allowed a building to both overshadow the Yarra and be built into the Yarra. But the worst problem of the World Congress Centre (because it is in fact functional inside) is that we have a debt which we are going to have to pay off in the near future. Several $100m, thank you very much, unbudgeted, simply passed on to us by the cabinet than ran Victoria over the last decade.

The Bayside issue, its staggering cost and mismanagement, is a further example of the legacy Victoria has to deal with, and solve. Once again, unfulfilled promises and wasted money. But we will solve those difficulties and are doing so now.

The third problem, by way of background, was the loss of key institutions from throughout our capital city. Headquarters like the Australian Securities Commission moved from Melbourne (when it was the NCSC) up to Sydney; the Australian Tourism Commission headquarters shifted camp as well; we lost the headquarters of one of our principal banks (we lost the bank as well) with the State Bank going to Sydney. We have lost, effectively, Australian Airlines, because all of its senior management has gone to Sydney. If you have got a vision for the capital city you can't let it continually be deprived of its assets.

You must face the problems of the 80s and drive yourself out of them, and our intention is to drive ourselves out of them. But enough of the past, as I do not want to dwell on it. It is simply where the Kennett Government had to start.

Now we present an exciting vision for the future. "Agenda 21" is all about is getting a fresh process going of putting civic projects in place, so that we can start the job creation and the asset creation which is absolutely integral to reviving the capital city.

When I talk about the capital city I am not just talking about the City of Melbourne, I am talking very much about the broader capital city area that people use, which includes part of South Melbourne, etc.

There are a number of key, capital city projects that we are starting; all of them are interlinked, all of them part of a plan for the Melbourne area:

• A new Casino on the Yarrabank, a new Exhibition Centre adjacent to the Casino, immediately opposite the World Congress Centre, once again on the banks of the Yarra.
• A new Museum of Victoria, much promised by our predecessors, never delivered. We have found a way to pay cash for the project and to get it delivered.
• The Regent/City Square, dealing with it in a manner that means you don't just put off the problem because it is 'not ours', but you address it, because it is currently a blight in the middle of the city.
• Significantly, dealing with other heritage buildings as well, such as Old Treasury, and the Customs House in Flinders Street.

We want to start now, not simply make promises. We want to create the jobs that are part of this, we want to create the investment and work, and get Victoria moving on them. And we want to pay cash for these projects, not engage in debt.

The Kennett Government has done so many things already for the city and I want to give you an outline of them in brief. The first one is a symbolic example of what you can do for the city and it has got nothing to do with Capital works. It was the first Bill that I introduced into Parliament, in November last year, which has probably done more for the city at weekends than any other single reform that has been brought in. We made it legal to buy products in the city on Sundays.

We brought in 24 hour, 7 days a week shop trading for the capital city; for Melbourne and for Southbank. Our reform ended the city's outdated and absurd trading restrictions. There have been no tidal waves, there have been no religious insurrections, it has been accepted as being a logical, long overdue reform! We have probably done more for family life than any Government since the turn of the century, because now Dad goes shopping as well!

If you ever want to see law reform that actually works, just walk through the city on a Saturday evening or a Sunday. Most people think that we only legalised shop trading on Sunday; we did, but the key part of the Bill was we also legalised shop trading on Saturday nights. As a result, instead of thousands of people being guided out of places like Melbourne Central late on a Saturday afternoon, people can stay and keep on shopping, have a meal, see a movie; people can exercise choice.

We have introduced other practical initiatives. If you drive down Spring Street you will see the construction works for the new City Circle Tram loop around the grid of Melbourne. I start off mentioning these two initiatives - Shop Trading hour reforms for the capital city and extending the tram network for the capital city - to highlight that our policies are not going to be just about building buildings. They are also about integrating our assets, about recognising the 'icons' of the city, and about building on existing strengths that we take for granted but which people from interstate and overseas would love to have in their cities.

A great icon of Melbourne, its identity, is Melbourne Trams, and yes Victorians do take them for granted. They are safe, they are efficient, they are largely graffiti and crime free, they actually don't cost as much to run as many other forms of public transport.

We are now linking the tram system for the first time by laying new tram tracks down Spring Street - the first extension of the city Tram Network for four decades. At a cost of $6 million dollars it is probably the best money ever spent, because what we can do by laying the new track is to 'square all the circles', if you will excuse the terminology. Without changing trams you will be able to travel around all of the city precinct, and what we can then say to an interstate tourist is "catch the tram outside the Windsor", and it will bring you back to the Windsor. You will be able to catch the tram down adjacent to the new Exhibition Centre and Casino sites. It will take you there, quickly and effectively. It will travel in a circle and, during the term of this Government, we will take this reform an extra step. The Government will make all tram travel in the city free. An unprecedented initiative.

You can see what we are doing is saying that we have a great existing asset in W class trams, so let's use them better, let's use an improved tram system to link all of our projects together. Let's also note that people overseas have recognised that our trams are good, as they purchase and use them as tourism assets. Let's keep our trams, and use them as tourism assets here. The City Circle tram will be a destination in itself.

This was brought home to me when I went to New Orleans in 1988 for a Political Convention, and I arrived on the day that the local Mayor launched "River Walk" along Mississippi. If any of you have been there, the Mississippi is in fact a fairly uninspiring river, despite the romance. What the Americans have done is to put a very interesting tourism attraction along it. The tourism attraction of "River Walk" along the Mississippi is Melbourne trams! If Americans can pay several hundred thousand dollars to install each tram and have them running efficiently, and charge top dollar to use them, then perhaps we can use ours a little bit better here. Good for tourists, good for commuters, part of this theme of linking the city with one product, with an icon which already exists.

The "Agenda 21" civic projects are paid for by using the Casino revenue. The essential ingredient in this mix, given that we inherited a perilous Budget situation, is the importance of us securing these projects by using a new form of revenue. "Agenda 21" is using the revenue that will be provided by the new Casino, which in itself will be an attraction and a job generator.

We are proud to be the ones who have made the casino site available. The previous Government failed to make available the Yarrabank land, preferring instead to offer-up that part of the Southbank for medium density condominiums. We thought that was a senseless use of a priceless piece of land. It simply has the best view of Melbourne of any site. Large, available, picturesque, it is now to be used for the Casino. The three bidders, as they were at that time, made it quite clear that they wanted that site. The view from it is spectacular, which is why we made it available for use for that project.

The Casino site is now being cleared for the development, starting early next year. It will add a new tourism benefit and an entertainment benefit for our capital city.

Neighbouring it, on another very large site that we have chosen, will be the Exhibition Centre. And of-course, neighbouring that, the existing undervalued World Congress Centre. Our proposal is to ensure that we can get this Exhibition Centre up and going in the next few months. I am pleased to note that, following a process that involved your Institute's President and the President of the Exhibition Industry Association, Denton Corker Marshall have won the right to be the architects for the Exhibition Centre. I congratulate them for that and I look forward to their work on this most important project.

The Exhibition Centre will be a 30,000 square metre, single level structure to replace the beautiful but outdated Royal Exhibition Buildings in Carlton. The current Exhibition Buildings have a weakness in that they are not air conditioned, are not column free, do not have load bearing floors and have poor access.

This will be a state-of-the-art facility which will put us in a position of having Australia's largest Exhibition Centre, opposite the World Congress Centre and linked by an enclosed new pedestrian bridge across the Yarra. You can just see what type of precinct we are now creating: the true entertainment precinct that is actually needed for Southbank.

Instead of the nonsense of Labor's flawed strategy, which would have seen condominiums built along the best part of our river, we are putting in place plans so that the "cappuccino precinct", as I call it, can continue, and so that we have different opportunities for people at different parts of the river.

The new Exhibition Centre is on an 8 hectare site with expansion capacity of another 5 hectares. It has the potential to grow in the future. That Centre will use the existing shell structure on the site; the $6 million dollar front door structure that was built for the previously promised but not delivered Museum. It is complimented by the waterside advantage and by the fact that the Polly Woodside is there as well. Once the new facility is provided and built, over the next two years, opening in 1996, we will have an excellent opportunity to win back the exhibitions and conventions that we have been losing to Darling Harbour and other places.

"Agenda 21" therefore has as its first drawcard - the Casino, along with the revenue it provides, and the Exhibition Centre and the asset that it will provide.

A further key element of "Agenda 21" is a new Museum for Victoria. We were determined to ensure that when the exhibition function of the Royal Exhibition Buildings in Carlton ended, as it inevitably would, that we continued to have an important civic role for the Exhibition Buildings: those grand buildings that celebrated their earliest time in 1880 and are clearly amongst the greatest heritage structure of Australia.

When the exhibition function moves out a museum function will move in, to the site adjacent to the Great Hall building.

The potential for this area is fantastic and it offers us the opportunity to have a mix of the old and the new, which is what museums are all about. The "old" being the address and identify of the Great Hall and the "new" being the $250 million dollar Museum that we will build on the existing development footprint behind the Great Hall. Historic sketches of the time show that the development footprint has had a variety of uses, including an aquarium, an Army base during the war and a football field!

What we are determined to do is to use the Great Hall for a future civic use and to pull down all of the post World War 2 dross that has been built around it. (I have to be careful here. I was at a function the other day and said that we would pull down all of this mirror wall junk and unfortunately the person who had put the mirror wall junk up was there, but even he conceded it was not part of our time.) All of this can and must be pulled down and we must also get rid of the ugly bitumen carparking that fronts both of the main visual access points to the Great Hall building.

If you have got a big picture for Melbourne then you look ahead to what occurs if you build a new Exhibition Centre. One of them is that your existing Exhibition Building is empty and we could have, by default, turned the Great Hall into a historic white elephant; instead we have secured an important civic use for this building.

We'll re-open the north face of the Great Hall, we'll pull down the post World War 2 buildings, and we'll get rid of the carparking that completely surrounds the building by putting the cars underground, which gives us the opportunity to reinstate gardens on the site. The Gardens will be protected and extended.

It is an extremely large site and our plan, by putting the cars underground and demolishing the non-heritage structures (which together cover an area as large as the entire heritage area) is to build a new Museum of Victoria that others have simply promised.

The Great Hall will be protected. It can't be air conditioned or partitioned, it would be improper to do so. It will be used for civic purposes and run by the Museum, but it won't be used for permanent displays, they will be in the new building. We will only build on the existing development footprint. We don't touch the gardens.

I believe that Australians will be proud of it when the new Museum is constructed over coming years.

At the beginning of our planning for all of these projects we made a commitment to ourselves. We were not going to promise something that couldn't be delivered and we were not going to promise something which meant a short cut on the project. $120m for an Exhibition Centre and $250m for a Museum can therefore only be regarded as a most important contribution to two civic projects. Further significant funds are being put toward restoring and expanding the State Library.

We will focus on a whole range of opportunities for the city, including the Docklands. The idea of extending the CBD into the Docklands in a grid form is dead and buried. We simply don't need that much land for a CBD. But we should use the Docklands to compliment the CBD with residential, commercial, waterfront, tourism and passive and active recreational uses and we can.

The new Government brought in legislation at the end of last year to end a central problem of the Docklands Authority, an old Melbourne problem. The Docklands Authority's boundaries ended at the Yarra. Now we have shifted the boundaries to include both sides of the Yarra and therefore we can have developments which address both sides of the Yarra and treat the Yarra as it should be: as the centre of the capital city rather than as the local government boundary.

Other projects that I want to mention include the Old Customs House, a brilliant building owned by the Commonwealth Government and which has enormous heritage significance. It brings with it the virtue of preserving a heritage building. It is on the City Circle Tram route and it is also on the Yarra. All of those virtues mean that we would like to see it stay in public hands and we're negotiating now with the Commonwealth Government to get access to that building at 400 Flinders Street, and to use it for a public gallery.

Remember that the site is directly opposite the planned Casino and therefore will be part of our endeavours to bring life to the area in an Arts and Tourism sense. For those of you that have not been inside the building, it is majestic with large rooms very suitable for a gallery.

The Regent building is another project on our agenda. It is a magnificent building, but it remains empty and redundant. We have worked to solve the long running Regent Theatre problem. You can't simply put that issue off as many City Councils have done over the year. And even though, as Jeff Kennett said, he is the fifth Premier and the current Lord Mayor is now the twenty-third Lord Mayor to tackle this issue, we would not be expressing a vision for Melbourne if we simply put the Regent off.

As a State Government we have committed up to $12.5m to fund the restoration of the Regent and we see that as a project that will bring our principal street, Collins Street, back to life.

For all of the love and admiration people have for Swanston Street, I happen to think that the best street and the identity street of Melbourne is Collins Street and it is a disgrace that for two decades a large part of Collins Street has simply been dysfunctional because the Regent has not been renovated. Despite its challenges and its difficulties we are getting on with the job and we are optimistic of securing an agreement that suits the public interest.

At the top of that great street is the Old Treasury Building, which we are currently spending $3m on to renovate and open-up for public use. Tragically the sandstone currently comes off in your hands and that $3m is money long overdue and very well spent. We are also doing what I call restumping and rewiring, which basically means improving the interior and getting it back to its original condition and for the first time in history we will be making that building open for public access. The ground floor will be used in something like a Best of Victoria or Museum of Melbourne Exhibition, as a starting point for tourists and once again the new tram route which will be going past it. You catch a tram outside the Old Treasury, you do the City Circle route which links all of our existing and future assets together, and you can come back to the Old Treasury.

"Agenda 21", therefore, ties the assets together and creates new features to enhance the capital city.

What I wanted to conclude with is talking about one project that we actually promised not to do! In a piece of outrageous honesty at the last election we said that we would not roof the Jolimont railyards. Not because we did not want to but because everyone else at every election always promises to roof the Jolimont railyards and fails to do so. The irony is that upon being elected it is quite clear that you don't need to roof the Jolimont railyards, you simply need to remove the track. I am pleased to report that by December this year over three hectares of railway land with a river frontage and immediately near the National Tennis Centre will be cleared of long redundant transport uses and made available for more exciting purposes.

It is an example that, even when you have no available capital works budget, and when you are in a recession, you can still create incredible opportunities for people to look at and be enthused by. This is a part of Melbourne people thought we would never get access to; it is a part of Melbourne which has got some very exciting future prospects. So if any of you have any ideas on what you could do with over three hectares of priceless inner city land, next to the National Tennis Centre, with the most beautiful vista down the Yarra River, then please come and talk to us. I will regard it as an achievement when the Office of Major Projects simply puts up the fence and ends the outdated use of that site.

The Government has created this opportunity because it has been prepared to take on the sacred cows. You might ask yourself; why wasn't this land cleared years ago? Why was the Tennis Centre built on parkland, rather than the railway reserves? It is because no Government has actually 'run' the Jolimont railyards for decades. It has been run by the Unions, and now that the Unions have had to take a different approach we are able to free up that site. If we do nothing with it this year, it does not worry me, the achievement will be the fact that the public will be able to gain access to it, and will be able to use it for a smart purpose.

"Agenda 21" is ambitious and vital.

Many people would have perhaps accepted us doing nothing and simply saying times are tough. The Kennett Government determined that it would have a responsible current account strategy and a purposeful capital account strategy. This is what it is all about, and we know that Victorians are behind it. Thanks very much.