Page 1939 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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The government will also hit motorists with a 34 per cent increase in revenue for traffic fines. Coming to work today along Belconnen Way, I saw those little white vans out there. You can expect a 34 per cent increase in revenue from traffic fines.
The city heart levy imposed on Civic businesses—budget paper No 3, page 47—is back on the agenda, although no-one knows how far it will extend and how it will operate. Nevertheless, the government expects to raise $600,000 in the coming year and $1.2 million in the following years.
The budget will do nothing to make housing in the ACT more affordable. Indeed, anyone from south-west Sydney lured by the Chief Minister’s campaign to attract new settlers to the capital is liable to want to cancel removalists and stay right where they are. In the news reported yesterday, we find that the ACT already leads the way Australia-wide in the decline in house loan approvals. This data was recorded before the interest rate rise in May. According to the Property Council of Australia, housing affordability has worsened in the ACT at rates of almost double the national average.
We find in the budget that stamp duty concessions for first home buyers have been tightened up, with the properties for which you can get some stamp duty concessions reducing from an upper limit of $375,000 put in by the former Treasurer down to $326,000. Yet the average price of a house in Canberra is $352,500. Unlike all the government’s taxes and charges, there is no indexing. What $326,000 can buy in four or five years time will be even less than now.
A new report by the Residential Development Council has found that government charges in the ACT are now higher than land costs and have risen by 237 per cent over the past five years from $32,047 to $108,011. Yes, you heard right—over $100,000 for a new four-bedroom home and land package in the ACT. That is what it is based on. More than a quarter of the price consists of government-related charges and compliance costs.
Is it any wonder that the ACT has Australia’s lowest population growth, according to the budget, at 0.5 per cent per annum or about 1,000 people a year? That compares with the national figure of 1.2 per cent. That compares with the figure of over two per cent over the border in Queanbeyan. But that has nothing to do with the undesirability of the region we live in. It has everything to do with ACT government policies, as I indicated. Queanbeyan, just over the border, exceeds the national average. The ACT is 0.5. You have only to look at booming Queanbeyan where the growth rates are, in fact, close to 3 per cent.
This is an anti-business budget from a government that simply does not understand what business does. How hollow the protestations of the government’s economic white paper now ring with the claim of being “unashamedly pro-business and committed to actions that will make the ACT the premier business-friendly location in Australia”. That is just another example of doublespeak from the government.
There has been a savage cut to BusinessACT’s budget. The number of staff has gone down from 49 to 18. There have been dramatically reduced services to business and very large increases in taxes, fees and charges. And that tells the real story. For this
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