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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4110 ..

We had this great, as I have been wont to call it, four-volume novel—but when I actually pulled it out of my shelves yesterday I realised that I had been underselling it; it is, in fact, a five-volume novel—housing affordability in the ACT, strategies for action; indicators for affordability in the ACT; housing affordability, towards an appropriate assistance strategy; land and planning mechanisms in providing affordable housing; and consulting the community on housing affordability. The five-volume novel was produced; it came out in glorious technicolour. Since then the government has done almost nothing about it; it was a waste of money, time and effort from the people who contributed so much and so much time.

Mr Wood: Why don’t you attend to what happens around the place instead of talking garbage? You just spit out the garbage. Why don’t you listen to what’s happening outside this place?

Mr Cornwell: We certainly do.

MR SPEAKER: Order, members! Mrs Dunne has the floor. There is plenty of time for other members to speak later if they so wish.

MRS DUNNE: Obviously we touch a nerve every time we talk about the housing affordability task force, and Mr Wood should be embarrassed about the lack of action.

But what we have here is a government that has done precious little until it was dragged kicking and screaming by its mates across the border. When Treasurer Egan announced that he was going to do something about first home owners, it was really the first time that this Treasurer started to focus on the issue.

The simple reason is that in the ACT, because we are an island in the middle of New South Wales, if this government did not do anything about it, our first home owners would be going across the border to Queanbeyan to take advantage of what Treasurer Egan was doing, and that would have been a huge cost to us. So the small amount of money forgone by the ACT government in its first home ownership scheme would be well and truly much less than the large amount of money in rates and revenue and GST that would be forgone if our first home owners went across the border to Queanbeyan because the New South Wales government was being much more generous than that of the ACT. It was catch-up politics at its best.

In some ways, Mr Speaker, it is superficially a very generous scheme and, while it is very pleasing to see a big increase in the uptake, it does not really address the substantive issue. What we are doing is taking somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000 off the cost of a house. But we need to look very carefully at the drivers that are driving up the cost of housing in the ACT.

I will look at just one thing. The Land Development Agency was put together as the great way forward in the ACT for all sorts of things, but it was also to be able to keep some control on the cost of housing. That was one of the many things. When the minister was sort of coming out and saying, “This is how the Land Development Agency would work and here is the economic modelling,” and members of the opposition received a briefing from the would-be land developers who were just waiting to get approval so

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