Page 3167 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 9 November 2021
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These decisions are getting made at the dinner tables of Canberra families every single moment. The cut and thrust of the neo-liberal trickle-down furphy perpetuated by the Canberra Liberals and Liberals just like them right across the country—if you have a go, you get a go and other such waxing lyricals—suggest that if we can just keep building and if we can just keep spending and if we just keep buying and if we just keep borrowing the prosperity will trickle down and everybody will find themselves doing just fine, if we see the course. That is actually not the case. The situation we find ourselves in is a direct result of those policies.
That conversation actually made me, a dyed-in-the-wool leftie, truly empathise with an investor in seven properties. It is amazing how the current policy settings have managed to make me do that, because I could completely understand why this person and his partner had made those choices. And this is the problem: these policy settings encourage families and encourage people with means who have bought the family home, which has blown up in wealth, to then start making decisions using tax settings that encourage them to protect their family and protect the people they love.
I am a landlord and I hate it. I do not like being a landlord. But I became a landlord four weeks after I was elected into this place because if I did not become a landlord and buy a property people that I love would have been homeless. In spite of the fact they work a 40-hour week and have done for near 60 years—living in this city might I add—the rental and housing market was completely out of reach for them. So many families have to make that decision.
But what so many families cannot possibly realise—because in a cut throat neo-liberal capitalistic world you make choices to protect your own personal self-interests without being able to fully appreciate the complexity of how they unfold on our community—is that all these families and people making choices like this have reinforced this current situation and we now found ourselves where auction is the best way to sell your home because we love the cut and thrust of the competition. First home buyers are borrowing way more than they possibly can afford because the Reserve Bank and banks are encouraging them to do so. Investors are competing with them because the federal government encourages them to do that with their tax settings, and we have not been completely honest about that reality.
That is why I found the original drafting of Mr Parton’s motion so difficult to digest and unable to be supported today. Not unlike other motions we have seen come to this place over the last year that call on some of sort of inquiry or review or survey, where there always manages to be one little invasive pernicious line that makes sure that it is done on the basis Canberra Liberals talking points and Canberra Liberals terms of reference and that it is unable to fully examine the complexity of a policy problem in its entirety.
The Canberra Liberals should be willing to have an honest conversation with the electorate about what beautiful green spaces they are going to do away with to give out all of this land? Tell us. Will the land west of the Murrumbidgee River end up as drives and cul-de-sacs? Is Kowen Forest going to be knocked down under a Canberra Liberals government? What are you going to do away with to give everybody all this land?
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