Page 1133 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 1991
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commissioned by Professor Max Neutze. It is usually found in most copies of the report on the Canberra leasehold system. They actually carry the report of Professor Neutze as an addendum. I will also be referring to a paper by the late Peter Harrison on the historical use of section 11A.
The amendments here are a series of amendments that are proposed to change the concept of section 11A. They result in a compromise, it seems to me, between the Liberals and the Residents Rally. The Residents Rally, favouring a 100 per cent levy on betterment, recognises in its policies that the leasehold system itself, giving no presumptive rights to the actual leaseholder but retaining the presumptive rights with the landlord, means that naturally 100 per cent betterment ought to apply. The compromise that it has reached with the Liberal Party as part of their alliance has actually turned out, in reality, to be quite a sell-out, because of the development of properties around Canberra that are going to go back to the old system of a 50 per cent betterment - which was, in many ways, an ad hoc system, I might add. That 50 per cent betterment that we have spoken about will apply to almost every property development that goes ahead in Canberra, because almost every property development has to do with properties that are over 20 years old, so they do not come into the negotiated agreement which I presume is between the Residents Rally and the Liberal Party.
When the announcement was originally made by the Chief Minister in February 1990 that a new scale of charges would be levied, a Canberra Times editorial followed on 4 March 1990, and I quote from that editorial:
In principle, a betterment levy should be 100 per cent of any increased value.
And, further down:
It might be better to set levies based not on the length of time since the leasehold was issued but since it was last transferred -
because the length of time upon which this is based has no relevance to the leasehold system at all. In fact, it reflects a total lack of understanding of how the leasehold system ought to work if the people of Canberra are going to get the greatest benefit out of this asset that they have.
We have very few assets in the ACT. We have very little mining; we have very few other assets. We do have our forests, and we do have the fact that the Government is here and hence we have that as an employment base; but there are very few other assets. The leasehold system, of course, is one of those assets - we own our land.
In November 1988, the late Peter Harrison wrote a paper on "The Origin and Intended Purpose of Section 11A and the City Area Leases Ordinance 1936". I will now quote extensively from that:
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