Page 582 - Week 02 - Thursday, 24 March 2022
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We are not at a point in this housing crisis where it can be an acceptable way of doing business, moving forward. This inquiry will enable us to have an important public conversation about how best to get people into homes.
I am not trying to single out developers who are simply using legal means to increase their profit and save themselves the hassle of managing tenants. In this conversation we need to look at the properties that sit vacant and the circumstances in which they are left without people living in them. We need every habitable dwelling in this city to be able to be inhabited by those seeking somewhere to live.
A vacancy tax on all habitable but vacant properties would either increase the government’s revenue, enabling us to deliver on our ambitious policy program of social and affordable housing, or it would mean that those who own these properties find it more feasible to rent them out or put them on the housing market for sale.
In examining vacancy taxes and other economic incentives for property owners to lease their properties for rent, it would be remiss of us not to extend such an inquiry to look at how we can rejuvenate commercial properties in local suburban shopping centres by implementing similar levers. When you buy commercial property in particular, you buy suburban utility; you buy local amenity; you buy a big chunk of someone’s community.
Many of Canberra’s suburbs were designed around the local shops that provide services such as grocery stores, chemists, post offices and hairdressers. Owning these premises to rent them out to these small and medium-sized businesses is a privilege. It is also a responsibility to these local communities to ensure that services are accessible and that local shops are a part of the suburb’s sense of community.
There are a lot of vacant suburban shopping centres across Canberra. You take something away from the suburb when you do not invest in it and you do not let those local suburban shopping centres thrive. We do not know yet why it has been permissible for property owners to keep these shops vacant for so long. What we do know, though, is that there is a high expectation from the community that that not be so.
The ACT government is investing almost $19 million in this budget alone to upgrade local shopping centres around the territory. That is a good thing. These upgrades will make shopping centres more accessible and comfortable for the community to access. What this inquiry could help us to understand is what other mechanisms the government can use to breathe life back into these suburbs.
Vacant shopping centres haunt suburbs all around Canberra. Shop-squatting is an issue all around Canberra and there are examples in every electorate that are causing problems. In Ginninderra, McKellar shops have been vacant for years. My colleague Jo Clay has lobbied on this issue and lodged a submission on it. The planning, transport and city services committee has been running an inquiry for the last 18 months about the Giralang shops site in Yerrabi. In Murrumbidgee, the vacant Coombs shopping centre is a frequent point of community concern, an advocacy shared by my colleague Minister Davidson.
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