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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4908 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, these two amendments apply the 30-year rule and the same once only use in terms of commercial leases. This is a very different situation, Mr Speaker, and I think it provides an opportunity for us to apply exactly what I have been talking about in terms of rental. We need to look carefully at the way we charge or tax businesses. One of the opportunities we have is with rates, and we do that with a differential rate for business. The Chief Minister recently announced a quite specific change in that way, to allow businesses to pay 15 per cent of the rates and residential lessees 85 per cent of the rates. In terms of businesses, when there is a clear-cut investment as part of a business it may be an appropriate time to look at whether rating is the appropriate way to go or whether rental on a lease is a more appropriate way to go. Accepting my amendment would allow us to consider a commercial rental proposition.

I do not have the paper with me, but I know that there is one written on this issue by Justice Rae Else-Mitchell, who distinguished very clearly between residential and commercial leases. It is quite some time since I read the paper; but, if my memory serves me correctly, he did not deal with rural leases. Commercial leases are a very different thing from people's homes. We know they are different and we deal with them in a different way in terms of rating. We deal with them in a different way in terms of a whole series of things.

This is about business and business investment; about making a commercial decision. It may be appropriate, therefore, Mr Speaker, to consider our whole range of possible measures of revenue raising. Where a business has held a 50-year lease and has written it off over that 50 years, instead of saying, "No, you have to pay up front the full value of the lease or we will take back the lease and pay you compensation for the property", which I imagine we do not want to do, it may be appropriate for us, for example, to say that we are going to change now to a high rental system. There is a range of possibilities available there that I think ought not be excluded. I feel, Mr Speaker, that commercial leases should be kept on a different footing from residential and rural leases. That is why it is that on this particular issue I am prepared to call for a vote.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (10.58): Mr Speaker, very briefly, the reasons for wanting automatic renewal of commercial leases are slightly different to those for residential leases in one sense, but perhaps they are not so different. The fact is that if we want residential leaseholders to have some confidence that the land that they invest in is their home and will remain their land even after the lease expires, even more so, with respect, it is important - - -

Mr Moore: And they pass it on to their children and so on.

MR HUMPHRIES: I beg your pardon?

Mr Moore: And they tend to pass those sorts of things on to their children, so there is an argument there.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, they want to pass it on to their grandchildren. Even more so, it would appear to me to be to the benefit of the community, of which Mr Moore speaks so often, that it be possible for people to make investments in the Territory in the confidence that the investment will be a long-term investment. It will not be

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