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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (2 March) . . Page.. 481 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

time so that we could properly examine and discuss with him the aspects of his report that the committee had an interest in. I thank also officers of PALM and representatives of the development industry who made submissions, along with representatives of the community sector who also made very useful submissions.

Mr Speaker, I have chosen to submit a report dissenting entirely from the majority report presented by Mr Rugendyke and the chairman, Mr Hird. The reason for that is that I do not believe that the majority of the report has in any sense attempted to critically assess the elements of the report that was presented by Professor Nicholls. Indeed, I would say that unfortunately the majority report has simply chosen to endorse in full the comments made by Professor Nicholls without any proper assessment of the issue of betterment and its relationship with the leasehold system.

In my dissenting report, I have chosen to outline three key areas where I believe the majority report is deficient. I have made the comment in my dissenting report that there is obviously a range of other issues dealt with by the Nicholls report which should be closely considered by the Assembly when the matter is debated in more detail. But, for reasons that include amongst them time, I have not chosen to go into detail in my dissenting report.

There are three key issues I want to deal with today. From them stem the four recommendations of my dissenting report. The first deals with the change of use charge and the leasehold system. A key purpose of the leasehold system is to ensure that the community receives the improved value of land when a lease is varied. The community is the lessor, and the community provides rights for a charge to the lessee for development of land. As has been acknowledged by organisations such as the Property Council, a lease is simply a contractual arrangement. It does not confer property rights on the lessee.

In my dissenting report I have quoted a comment from the Property Council in a background paper on the consequences of automatic right of lease renewal which I thought summed it up very well. The Property Council said in that document:

We charge betterment, or change of use charge, because the owner, the community, is selling property rights, rights to use the land for a purpose other than that originally granted, and in return for those rights being sold the lessee makes a payment and is able to use the land for that purpose. That is one of the key purposes of the leasehold system. If the Territory does not levy a change of use charge, we are essentially walking away from one of the key purposes of the leasehold system. That is what is being imposed by the Government and Professor Nicholls in his report, and that is the reason why I must dissent from the majority report.

The claim has been made that the change of use charge does not bring an enormous amount of revenue to the Territory. Certainly, when you compare it with other taxes and charges, it is at the low end. But there is no doubt that it is still a not insignificant

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