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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Thursday, 19 August 2004) . . Page.. 3959 ..

divvies them up and sells them to 10 or 15 builders or 20 or 30 builders. Under the present regime and under the one proposed in this legislation, each time they take one of those blocks and transfer it to a builder, in addition to having paid for the land, serviced the land and paid the stamp duty on the auction price, they now have to pay a fee of between $200 and $300—I cannot remember the figure—for every one of those transfers. I think the land has been paid for and paid for again. If we are talking about making land affordable and cutting down the barriers, we should be cutting down the fees as well. When a private land developer or the government acquires a large tranche of land and develops it—puts in the services and all those sorts of things—it is part of the deal that they will want to transfer the arising leases to somebody else. We know that from the outset, and they should not be triple charged for the privilege.

There are some good elements in this bill, and the opposition will be supporting it in principle, but we have some amendments. We will not be dealing with them today. I understand we will be adjourning further consideration after the bill is agreed to in principle. The bill is an all right piece of work from the minister and the government. It was talked about for a long time. It was a long time in arriving. It does not address all of the needs of the community. It has been put together by people who obviously do not have any real connection with how house building and development is done in the ACT. The minister would do well to seek advice from the average home builder, and the average solicitor who does conveyancing on these issues, as well as the peak bodies. The peak bodies are very critical. The Property Council and the Housing Industry Association, for instance, are particularly critical of the fees.

The fees that get paid through the process to ACTPLA do mount up. There is $300 here, and when the DA is put in there is more. All of these things have to be signed off by the certifier. They add up to thousands of dollars on every block of land sold in the ACT. The Housing Industry Association nationally has quantified the extent of government charges. We should not be contributing to them if we are serious about housing affordability. If we are serious about putting a stop to land speculation, we should be adopting the amendments proposed by the Liberal opposition because they reflect what happens today in the ACT and reflect the needs of people living today in the ACT. They do not penalise the mum and dad who might regret a decision but who are not hard up to the extent defined in the legislation. They would create a great deal more certainty than is currently the case. I suppose the provisions proposed by the minister do create some certainty: just abandon hope all ye who enter here.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MS DUNDAS (5.01): I am delighted to be debating this bill today, and the Democrats are happy to support it. Twelve months ago, I publicly raised the problem of land sharking after learning that land speculators were making profits of up to 43 per cent in just a few months as they bought and sold empty blocks in Gungahlin and Dunlop. So, I am delighted to see that the government has taken action to start work on closing the loophole that has allowed land speculation to go on.

While people on low incomes struggle to save enough for a house deposit, and we are on the cusp of a housing shortage, builders and land speculators have been making huge

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