Page 2583 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 24 August 1993
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MR KAINE: I think it is equitable. You can change it overnight if you have Mr Moore and Ms Szuty on side. I know that. I am well aware of that. But it does not say that you can do it without some debate. I will be interested in pursuing this debate further. There is more than one position that can be adopted on this. We have to look at whether or not we really have a leasehold system in the ACT today. It is a carryover from a leasehold system. It is very close to being a freehold system in many ways, even if we do not choose to call it that; and I think there are ramifications that flow from that that the Government should be taking into account.
MR MOORE (3.39): Good try, Trev - I mean "Mr Kaine", but I use "Trev" just for the alliteration, Madam Speaker. Before I deal with the Minister's speech, I would like to take up some of the points that Mr Kaine raised, especially the point he made in his summary that we have a de facto freehold system. Mr Kaine's arguments were all premised on the notion that, basically, since we pay so much money up front for our leases we have a de facto freehold system. He said that, if you accept that premise, then a series of things follow.
I do not accept the premise. There is one huge difference between a lease and a piece of freehold land that you do not seem to have recognised. It is very strange, but you do not seem to have recognised it. A lease is an agreement with a series of conditions and a series of purposes for which you can use that land. That is what distinguishes our system from a freehold system. Granted, the land rent system had other things that distinguished it. I agree with you that that was the case. But we still have a leasehold system that is distinguished very clearly from a freehold system by the fact that you have a certain purpose for which you can use your lease. That is what the betterment debate is about. If you wish to change the purpose of your lease, as far as I am concerned, there should be only one reason, and that is that it is in the public interest. "Public interest", of course, can be defined very broadly, and often the public interest will coincide with the interests of the individual leaseholder and of a developer waiting to develop a particular piece of land.
The notion that you put forward, Mr Kaine, is that for all practical purposes there is no difference. For all practical purposes there is a world of difference between a freehold system and a leasehold system. This has been a source of anguish and annoyance to the Liberal Party. One thing that surprises me is that the Government is so reluctant to move to a point where they can raise revenue through this system. It seems to me that that would be far less painful than the system of raising rates. Look at the Liberal inspired ratepayers association that is currently rearing its head to object about rising rates. At the same time as the Liberals do not want rates to rise, they do not want something that can raise taxes in any other way. It seems to me that we have the possibility of doing that.
The other mistake - and it was just a simple mistake - that Mr Kaine made was when he said to Mr Wood, "You cannot just change this overnight with a wave of the hand". The reality is that Mr Wood can do just that. What I can do by giving drafting instructions, having legislation drawn up and having legislation tabled in this Assembly Mr Wood can do by regulation. There is no question about the fact that he has the power to change the betterment scale by regulation. He could change it from the current sliding scale to 100 per cent simply by regulation, should he wish to. He has that power.
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