Page 489 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 1990
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Mr Kaine: Is it permissible for the speaker to have an assistant, Mr Speaker?
MR SPEAKER: I would certainly think so.
MR MOORE: As I explained at the beginning, Mr Speaker, I had expected to have just a few minutes to make sure I had these in order. The Amdahl building across the road was originally leased by the YMCA and Legacy. The situation with that particular lease was that they sought a change of purpose clause. The YMCA, at that stage, had a piece of land that they combined with Legacy. The purpose was changed so we now have the Amdahl building instead of one for community use. That building is now used as an office block. The result of it was that there was a rearrangement with the land for YMCA and, not only did they get a windfall profit of some millions of dollars - as did Legacy, although not nearly as much - but they also happened to wind up with more land than they started with. We now see a situation next to that very site where the City Bowl has been purchased by a developer who has then closed it down and not used that lease according to the requirement of the particular purpose of the lease that he has.
The windfall profit went to worthwhile community groups like Legacy and the YMCA - and I have the highest regard for those groups as, indeed, I do for the Uniting Church who made millions of dollars from their site - but the point of the matter is that the money belonged to the people of Canberra and should those people have gone with other community groups to try and bid for $2m, then their chances would have been equivalent to other people's. I doubt if they would have been able to make that sort of money that way as indeed they did under the back counter. This is the whole problem that we have with maladministration of the leasehold system.
Professor Peter Self of the ANU urban research group has a wide experience both in economics and planning - he is a professor of economics and planning, he has great familiarity with new towns in England and the concept of a garden city. He says that it is possible for us to have the best possible facilities in the ACT simply by the appropriate administration of our leasehold system. That is what we must make sure that we do.
There are further current examples that require some elucidation, but before I do, let me emphasise this: there is a very big difference between the appropriate profits developers make in developing a building according to the purpose of the lease - that is a perfectly justifiable, perfectly appropriate, legitimate type of profit - and the profit of land speculation which is justifiable and appropriate under other systems but is not appropriate under the leasehold system. Under the leasehold system we, the people of Canberra, are the owners of the land.
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