Page 5684 - Week 17 - Thursday, 5 December 1991
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MR WOOD (Minister for Education and the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (4.04): Mr Speaker, the Government opposes this amendment. The matter of betterment remains one that the Government keeps under active consideration.
MR COLLAERY (4.05): Mr Speaker, this is a very vexed issue in the Canberra community, and Mr Moore, of course, is one of the great proponents of it. Mr Kaine said that the Forrest bowling club could not afford to redevelop on this basis; but, even under our own guidelines that the community presently operates under, the betterment for the Forrest bowling club on our calculations is in the region of 83 per cent. The implication that we got from Mr Kaine's speech was that the betterment would cripple the club. The fact is that, if it can afford to go ahead with the development at 83 per cent, then perhaps the example that Mr Kaine chose really did not support his case that strongly, because it is only a margin of 15 to 17 per cent on the amendment proposed by Mr Moore.
The Rally, of course, in government, has understood, firstly, the very strong community pressure for there to be a retention of concessional leases in the public domain. That is one of the reasons why the betterment for concessional leases starts at 100 per cent and moves down the scale, such that, even though the lease at Forrest was issued in 1982 or 1984, from memory, it is still 83 per cent.
The other issue not addressed by Mr Kaine, of course, is the scale of development on blocks. One of the reasons why the Rally has reached some accommodation on this issue is that, if we are going to not have the leasehold system administered in the manner in which we want it to be administered because we are not going to be in government in our own right, the higher the betterment the greater the scale and intensity of development to recover the payment of betterment.
So, there is a contradiction in this issue; that is, if we are in a position where we cannot achieve what we want to achieve on betterment, then to work some other measure that may result in increased and more intense development, particularly on concessional community sites, which are often jewels in the planning order, could work some disadvantage. We, of course, stand by those betterment decisions made previously. We would like to move to an optimum situation; but we know that the vote is going to be lost today, and I will not prolong the debate.
MR MOORE (4.07): Mr Kaine, in mentioning the Forrest bowling club, of course, drew on a particular situation that Mr Collaery has clarified in some ways. But, quite clearly, in that case, the profit was made out of the buildings being built, out of the work being put in and out of the productivity. I have no difficulty with that. I think, "Good on them", and I think that providing
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