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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Thursday, 19 August 2004) . . Page.. 3958 ..

for that I am grateful. I applaud the minister. I think that is a good step in the direction of making land management more orderly. But what we are really seeing here are a lot of obstacles put in people’s way to make reasonable transactions more difficult to take into account.

I asked for information and I am grateful to the minister’s office for providing me with an excellent briefing and also some excellent background information. It is true that there are people in this town who speculate on the sale of land. I have been shown examples of blocks of land changing hands more than once on the one day, and in that time the price of those blocks of land had gone up substantially. I hear a block of land in Dunlop that was purchased on 12 September 2003 for $104,000 was sold on the same day for $145,000. That is a profit of $41,000. If you think there is a problem here—and I suspect that there is—part of the problem is that if more land were available, people would not be prepared to pay what looks like silly money for a 12-hour transaction.

One has to ask the question why are people paying what looks like silly money for a 12-hour transaction? It gets back to my original point: people are doing this because of a bad land release system. What we have here is bad law to deal with hard cases—and they are hard cases—but I think some of the amendments I propose to move later in the debate will address some of those hard cases. They will make it easier for people who are going about their normal business and just doing the right thing, but who have changed their minds for a variety of reasons. They will be able to get around the system without being penalised and being treated as if they are part of some Russ Hinze type white shoe brigade.

Most of the people who transact in this way are just ordinary people, ordinary builders. They might not be able to get indemnity insurance for another building job this year and they have to sell the block. As an example, Mr Deputy Speaker, you might buy a block of land to build a nice house just to suit you. You put down your deposit and get the holding lease and you are waiting for the land to be developed. You are talking to your architect and suddenly you see a ready-built house somewhere to die for and you think, why go through all of this effort, and you reassess your plans. If this were New South Wales, you could just sell the land to somebody else. But in the ACT, under these provisions, you cannot. Under these provisions you could hand the lease back at market value or purchase price, whichever is the lower. Alternatively, you will have to build something on that block of land and then sell it.

From time to time people make decisions, which, in changing circumstances, they may regret. They are not hard up. They do not meet any of the hardship requirements, but from time to time they would like a better system. What I am proposing by my amendments is a system that meets the minister’s requirements to stop people speculating, but does not penalise the mum and dad who buys a block of land and then thinks better of it. It happens from time to time. When people do this we need to be careful that we do not put so many traps in their way that they do not act in the best interests of the territory or themselves. I am concerned about some of the potential for charges that exist in the legislation. I know they have existed since the outset of the land act, but if we are going to fix these things we should fix that.

Private land developers or the government take up and develop large blocks of land—something like Harrison stage 1, 460 blocks. Then somebody buys 460 blocks and

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