Page 1400 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 2021
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working with established community housing-based programs, people can rent out their properties at less than 75 per cent of market rent to eligible households and, as a result, receive an exemption for land tax.
As Ms Le Couteur noted at the time, we know that many people are socially minded and may see a scheme such as this as an opportunity to directly help their community.
Many people who own a second dwelling did not purchase it to maximise income. Sometimes people own a second house because of a new relationship or an inheritance. We have people going overseas for two- or three-year periods on DFAT postings and the like. These families have their rent paid on posting and they just want to move back into their home when they return. In each of these scenarios, property owners might be incentivised to forgo some rental income in exchange for having their land tax waived.
It is now two years since the scheme was introduced. It is clear that there are landlords in our community who are keen and able to play a part in responding to the rental affordability issues faced here. We now have two community housing providers operating schemes: HomeGround, operated by CHC, and Rentwell, operated by YWCA Canberra. They report significant interest and have been able to provide homes to 54 households across Canberra, to date.
I would like to share the story of someone who has been housed through Rentwell. It is important to remember the human realities when making even technical amendments such as this. Rentwell was able to house a single mum with two young children who had moved to Canberra to escape a domestic violence relationship in Queensland. After uprooting her family for their safety, her family was able to find an affordable home in Canberra. This is just one of 54 stories.
I would like to use this as an opportunity to remind those who sometimes complain about the charges of land tax in the ACT that this scheme exists and to remind everyone that landlords do not have to pay land tax so long as they rent out their property affordably. We hope that changes such as this will help to transform the view of housing to be a right and a community good rather than a vehicle for wealth generation.
This is one of the reasons that we were keen to ensure that this approach was supported and extended through this term of the Legislative Assembly. It is fitting that this is one of the early deliverables of the parliamentary and governing agreement for the Tenth Assembly.
The remaining provisions of the bill are minor and technical amendments across a range of tax and duty related acts. One useful clarification is an amendment of the Duties Act which ensures that conveyance duty concessions are available to pensioners who have a disability purchasing residential shares in not-for-profit supportive housing properties. This ensures that a person with a disability who would have been exempt from duty if acquiring the property directly is not subject to duty through indirect acquisitions of interests—for example, using a company title—in supportive housing. It is a complicated but important and necessary clarification to
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