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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 967 ..

MR MOORE (Minister for Health and Community Care) (3.38): I do not think there has been an occasion in the last 12 years or more when the change of use charge or betterment issue has been debated in the Assembly that I have not taken the opportunity to speak to it. Because that is the case, because my views are very clearly on the record, I will be brief. I want to reiterate the comments which Mr Corbell has just outlined quite effectively. It is a great joy that the Labor Party has come around to this way of thinking. I know that has been no small effort from Mr Corbell.

Mr Corbell: Better late than never.

MR MOORE: Much better late than never. Instead of handing over 50 per cent of the community's assets, we now have the opportunity to ensure that proper consideration is given to the change of use charge. I am afraid that both the majority report of the committee and the Government's response to this report are entirely inadequate. It will not surprise you, Mr Speaker, to know that this is one of the elements I stood aside from in Cabinet, and you can see the result. I should have stayed in there and been persuasive enough to convince Mr Humphries on my right and Mr Smyth on my right - I am not quite sure which one is further to my right on this issue - that what we should be doing is ensuring that the community asset is protected.

What I find most difficult to understand - and I put this to Mr Rugendyke because I know he has come into this with an open mind - is that those who are the strongest advocates of removing as much possible of the change of use charge are the landlords. The irony is that, if you said to those landlords that we want you to hand over to your tenants the benefit from any changes they make to the property, the landlords themselves would be horrified. That is exactly what they are asking us to do.

It is almost invariably but not always the case that landlords are developers. These people are asking us to hand over to them certain rights. These same business people would never dream of handing over rights to their tenants. Yet they are our tenants - the tenants of the people of the ACT. We ought not be handing over those rights; we ought not be giving them large sums of money. What we should be doing is optimising the return from the change of use charge.

We have never had the opportunity to do that. When I last spoke on this issue, I said that perhaps the best method of resolving this was a referendum. Members should give that further thought because, the more I think about it, the more I think it is a good idea.

MR QUINLAN (3.42): I am one of many members who have lobbied the Government on this issue. I want to make the point that, as land values or property values increase because the city has grown and it has prompted redevelopment and therefore a change in use, and that change in use in turn increases the particular value of that land, there are three parties who could be classified as beneficiaries. They would be the community, the leaseholder - or, as Michael has pointed out, the landlord; we have an orgy of agreement here, Michael - or the developer.

The first person you would chop off that list, by any reasonable logic, would be the developer because they are going to benefit from growth in a city. The benefit would accrue to the person holding the property if there were an increase in the property's

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