Page 137 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 May 1989
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The question of rates and tax rebates for owners of listed properties where preservation can be shown to disadvantage the owner should also be examined. We recognise that heritage listing in some areas can of course increase value. But we must seek some method of determining how to assist people to keep the community heritage. They act as custodians for us, and if they are having to pay very high rates to keep, out of loyalty, their heritage property on the ground, we need to examine the prospects of those issues.
Additionally, we need to look at advising couples such as we saw at Telopea Park West on other alternative stratagems. Of course, the statement was that the developer approached them, or that they approached the developer. I do not wish to go to the facts of the matter because the Rally has been told two different stories on that. There was one developer with a record for knocking down corners in Canberra, and also cutting a few corners with the Building Section, but we will hear more about that in the Assembly in future.
We hope that couples who for very good reasons wish to stay in their environment will be able to turn to advice - confidential, disinterested advice - on the subject of how they can best achieve their aims of living in their loved environment. That also means that the aged persons accommodation policy has to be reviewed at the earliest possible date. Few of us have seen an aged persons unit on the market for under $140,000 or $150,000 in recent years. We are not talking about care for the frail, impoverished aged; we are talking about capitalisation at a late stage for some lucky few.
We need to work out ways along the lines of the Scandinavian model of seeing whether the aged can live in their premises with their extended families and receive financial assistance in extending the homes of their own families and loved ones, so that they do not remain isolated - with two, four or six on a corner - in an aged persons semi-ghetto with neighbours who are annoyed about the development seeing them as some type of intruders. This is a very unhappy situation which has arisen in this Territory. It has to do with the aged persons unit policy being misconceived, wrongly applied and poorly administered by those responsible.
Finally, the Deputy Chief Minister referred to the leasehold system as something that we hold dear and of course as a necessary aspect of our revenue base. The leasehold system must not become again a revenue base for those few administering it who have managed to turn the leasehold system to their profit. Of course, many of you will know that at an early stage a spokesperson for the Administration on the demolition of property in Manuka was an official who was developing aged persons units in league with other parties.
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