Page 5647 - Week 17 - Thursday, 5 December 1991
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Clause 171
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.49): We have just had an interesting debate about lease renewals and the imposition of constraints on somebody at the time of renewal of a lease. I think that we have now reached an important stage in this debate. I move:
Page 81, line 20, omit paragraph (g), substitute the following paragraph: "(g) the lessee pays such fee fixed by the Executive for granting the further lease as does not exceed the cost of granting the lease.".
My amendment is to delete the words at subparagraph (g) of clause 171 and insert in lieu the words that appear at subparagraph (d) of the preceding clause that we have just endorsed. I believe that a lease of land is a lease of land and it does not matter whether you have a house on it or whether you have a business on it. When it comes to renewing it, since we have now agreed that people on residential land should have an unfettered right to a renewal of their lease when the time comes, why would we seek to impose a greater constraint simply because a piece of ground has a business being conducted on it?
What this is is a disincentive to business. What it does is to say to people who have a very enterprising business on their block of land, and because of their enterprise they have turned that block of land and that business into something more valuable than it was before, that when they want to renew we are going to make them pay for that. It is a disincentive to business and what it will do is to cause people to think, when they are getting close to the expiry of their lease, "Should we be moving our business over the border to Queanbeyan where we do not have to pay this kind of premium periodically when our lease runs out?".
If we go on to the next amendment, incidentally being proposed by Mr Jensen, if we accept that amendment, which he has foreshadowed, he is saying, "Every 50 years we are going to make you pay through the nose because you are running a successful business, at the outside, because we will not give you a lease that is more than 50 years; it may be only 30 or 25 or 20, and every time your lease runs out we are going to hit you, the businessman who is making Canberra into a prosperous place, for another charge". In my view, that is absurd and it creates two classes of leaseholders. Quite frankly, I can see no justification for it - no justification whatsoever.
It confuses the issue between leasehold management on the one hand and revenue raising on the other. They are two different things and I believe that we have to separate them. We already catch the business people who are running their businesses out there through land tax; we already
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