The government will push ahead with the sale next year of the gravel car park on Constitution Avenue in front of the Canberra Institute of Technology, where it wants a developer to build townhouses and "large mixed-use buildings", linking to Commonwealth Park.

Ms Gallagher confirmed it would also develop the West Basin land taken up largely with car parking and home to boat and bike hire businesses. The government is working on a road, boardwalk, cycle paths and pavilions in the area, and plans to sell a waterfront site in 2016 for apartments and commercial use.

The swimming pool on the lakefront, which includes a quarantined, possibly heated, swimming area in the lake itself, looks likely to go ahead. Ms Gallagher pointed out that the present city swimming pool had reached the end of its life and needed replacing.

But the rest of the City to the Lake project – the convention centre, the stadium and the lowering of Parkes Way to provide easier, more people-friendly access from the city to the lake – has been put on ice for an unknown number of years. Ms Gallagher said no project had been scrapped, but the priorities for the next five years were the Mr Fluffy asbestos clean-up, the tram system, the new public hospital and schools.

She promised a more detailed timetable for the big-picture City to the Lake projects in the midyear budget update in February.

"No project has been lost. We're just saying to people we're going to have to think about the timing with which they're delivered," she said. "I think this is all really reasonable and sensible in the face of a significant unforseen hit to our budget which is coming in the way of Mr Fluffy and doing the right thing by the Mr Fluffy owners."

The government would not call a halt to commercial development on the lakefront because it was an area it wanted to see developed and opened up, she said. But it would not allow "just monolithic high-rises along the lakefront with nothing for people".

"That is the project [for which] we're getting approaches from investors out of Canberra and overseas and I think it would be crazy of us to say there is no development on this site because we haven't built a stadium. So we have to continue those discussions, but nobody's talking about the sell-off of land in the absence of public infrastructure.

"Yes, there will be blocks released and we will continue to work on our own public infrastructure program as part of that, but some of that might need to be delayed two years whilst we pay for whatever the wash-up comes out of the Mr Fluffy clean-up."

Liberal leader Jeremy Hanson said the government was "verging on chaos".

"What they've been telling us for the last few years in terms of their priorities, in terms of their so-called vision, has been thrown and it's all on light rail. he said.

"We don't know the answer in terms of what they're going to do with West Basin. What is the plan for the convention centre? Is there going to be a stadium? We've got parts of the government saying this is off for five years, others saying, 'oh no it may come back on sooner'. This is a government now that really doesn't seem to know what its talking about other than this desperate desire to build light rail at all costs."