Page 2404 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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to allow them to do so. But it is true to say that they have the advantage, at the moment, of falling interest rates. The net result will be that they will see very little difference in terms of the amounts of money coming in and going out. So, we are taking advantage of that.
The scare tactics that are coming out of the Real Estate Institute and bodies like it, such as the Residents Rally, indicate that there is going to be a terrible increase to tenants. That simply cannot be shown to be the case. Markets have dictated rents in the ACT, and will continue to do so.
To summarise, contrary to what Mr Collaery has said, the notion of the one per cent land tax is very effective and very important because it is a tax on speculation as opposed to a tax on productivity. I would like to see us continuing to move on a tax on all forms of land speculation, so that we can start to remove the taxes that we have on productivity, such as payroll tax and other taxes along those lines. That is the direction in which we should be moving.
Mr Collaery: Yes, we do not disagree with that. But it is your selective introduction - - -
MR MOORE: Mr Collaery interjects, "We do not disagree with you"; so I can hear that Mr Collaery is in agreement with the notion of the one per cent land tax, which seems quite sensible to me.
The next point that I would like to raise is a warning about a comment in the Canberra Times editorial of Saturday, 27 July, which was entitled "Pinching from Bob to pay Rosemary" - a catchy little title. It says:
The ACT's public housing stock is higher than in the states. Many tenants do not qualify for or need rent subsidies. The ACT Government should get out of the business of providing public housing to anybody but the needy. Excess assets could be sold.
It is true that that could happen. But allow me to give you this warning: The difficulty with doing that is that, if that goes ahead, if the suggestion is followed, we will wind up with a system in which the public housing is marginalised housing. The advantage of having the public housing system as it is at the moment is that those who can afford to pay the rentals and who are paying the full rentals are subsidising the needy, without any further injection of funds from the ACT. It is a quite appropriate way to go.
If that is working most effectively, it is an area that could be looked at and investigated for possible corporatisation of some form - I use the word loosely but broadly - so that a housing trust can be seen to be a group
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