Page 1320 - Week 04 - Thursday, 5 May 2022
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that side. Then the growth of Canberra slowed, and the powers that be at the time pressed pause on that, and they never really got back to it.” To me, that is a pretty sensible clarification to someone from out of town about why Tuggeranong town centre is not a town centre and that it is on the western edge.
We are at the height of a housing affordability crisis in Canberra, but I think it is very clear, as has been so clearly articulated by Ms Lee, that it is clearly worse here than in most other parts of this country. Despite what our Labor and Greens MLAs might want to hear, so much of this is about the long-term failure of their parties in the planning space around land supply. I am not going to trot out those land ballot numbers again for Whitlam, Macnamara and Taylor, but they are absolutely indicative of an undersupply of land in the territory.
There are those who believe that this is part of a wider plan to force more Canberrans into high-rise apartments. Those theories do not come just from us; they come, most notably, from one of this city’s Labor heroes, former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, because, as much as Mr Gentleman tries to trash the vision that is being presented here, it is a vision which is clearly shared by the man who sat in that chair, as Chief Minister for the Labor Party, for such a long period of time. Those opposite have not been able to fool him.
It is almost as though a group of Labor and Greens insiders sat around in a planning session after Mr Stanhope departed. They might have acknowledged that the Winton report into housing choice clearly showed that the overwhelming majority of Canberrans wanted to live in a standalone house, so at this progressive think tank, behind closed doors, they sat around with a whiteboard and dreamt up ways to end that—to crush the dream of house ownership and to drive people into apartments. I can imagine that someone said, “Here’s an idea. Surely, if we make the price of a house far too high for normal people to afford, they will be left with no option other than to leave and take their conservative voting values into New South Wales or to buy one of our thousands of apartments.”
I think this suggestion would have been met with knowing nods and much support. I am sure most people in that room already owned a standalone house—and if they were Greens they probably owned multiple properties—so they would all be fine. They would all be fine because they have their houses, and for the rest of the masses it is just, “Let them eat cake. Just let them eat cake on their apartment balconies.” Jon Stanhope, Khalid Ahmed, the MBA, the Real Estate Institute and many others believe that this is what is going on here.
Peter Tulip, who is the chief economist at the Centre for Independent Studies and used to be with the Reserve Bank, said recently on social media:
Canberra arguably has the most dysfunctional housing market in the country.
An ex-RBA chief economist with the Centre for Independent Studies said that Canberra arguably has the most dysfunctional housing market in the country, with the highest median rents, despite vast empty land near the centre. This highly credentialed independent commentator said on 29 April:
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