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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Thursday, 19 August 2004) . . Page.. 3961 ..

leases. Section 180 of the Land (Planning and Environment) Act requires the authority to consent to the transfer of leases where certificates of compliance have not been issued.

This bill and the accompanying instrument give the Planning and Land Authority the power to refuse a transfer and, through amendments to section 178 in its instrument, put some limits, and provide reasonable hardship provisions, on the surrender of the lease, if the lessee is unable to meet its requirements. In amending section 180, this bill allows for the authority to consent to the first transfer of an individual lease of undeveloped land. It covers transfers from the remaining private land developers who have holding leases and are responsible for the servicing and subdivision of the land. The building development provisions are not a relevant consideration. This change in process will probably be greeted with more enthusiasm than the rest of the bill combined.

This bill will ensure that windfall gains are not made through the purchase and non-development of housing blocks in Canberra suburbs. In essence, it provides a fairly simple mechanism that allows the authority to refuse a transfer of a lease where the lessee has failed to comply with the building and development requirements and provides a reasonable framework in which to accept the surrender of leases. Of course, the bill reflects the benefits of a leasehold rather than a freehold land tenure regime. Speculative investments in land, currency and commodities very rarely benefit the community. They reflect an ethos that puts individual advantage above social need. We should use all the mechanisms at our disposal to put charges on speculative gains or to rule them out altogether.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (5.07): I thank those members who have indicated their support for this small but important piece of legislation. The debate over speculation in land goes back to the early days of Federation. Indeed it was speculation on land that led to the Commonwealth parliament’s deciding to ensure that in the Federal Capital Territory, as it was then called, land would be held under leasehold, rather than under a freehold system. So, in many respects, the debate we are having today mirrors that discussion over a century ago.

The issue at stake, and the philosophical issue that Mrs Dunne seeks to address in her comments, is this: is speculation appropriate? In my view, if someone wants to speculate in something they own and which is entirely within the private sphere, there is perhaps an argument for that. But when you are speculating in what is essentially still a public asset, albeit held under lease by a leaseholder, there is not simply the relationship between the owner and the market. There is also the relationship with the community, the people who own the asset in perpetuity. That is what our leasehold system is all about.

For over a century there has been much argument about what is called the unearned increment. That is, the profit made through no result of labour or investment or improvement to the land, but simply because over time the value of that asset has increased. It is an unearned increment. So this amendment to the Land (Planning and Environment) Act is small, but will significantly improve the operation of the consent to lease transfer provisions in the land act. These amendments will ultimately result in the removal of unnecessary pressure on residential land prices by preventing speculative transfers of undeveloped residential land in the ACT.

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