Page 3202 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (11.41): I would like to commend my colleague Mr Mulcahy on bringing forward this motion. It is an important issue. It is a crucial issue. The issue of housing affordability and rental affordability in this town is very important. It is very important to thousands of Canberrans.
Before I get into the substantive part of the motion, I want to comment on some of the arguments that the Chief Minister was putting forward. He referred to the revenue from land tax and said, “Are you proposing to cut it by half? If you are getting $65 million now, you will get about 30 million then.” This idea that if you go down the road of cutting rates and taxes in certain areas you will always have a proportional decrease in revenue is absolute rubbish and it is known to be absolute rubbish. Several years ago, the commonwealth government cut the company tax rate from 36 per cent to 30 per cent, by about one-sixth. Did revenue from company tax rates go down by one-sixth? No, it did not; it boomed. In fact, it is that boom that has been underpinning our economy and has allowed the federal government to give income tax relief over several budgets. So this idea put forward by the Chief Minister that if you cut it by 10 per cent you will have 10 per cent less revenue and if you cut it by 50 per cent you will have 50 per cent less revenue is ridiculous. If you went down the road of reducing land tax rates, you would get more investors into the market—a wider pool of people to be taxed. That does need to be put on the record.
The Chief Minister also went on about median incomes in the ACT. It is true that we have higher median incomes. But it is unfair to compare us to the national average, when rural areas traditionally have much lower median incomes and cities have higher ones. A comparison with Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Adelaide would be much closer, so I do not think that was a reasonable comparison to make.
This goes back to the argument we were having in the last sitting of the Assembly from the Chief Minister: “If you had stuffed things up the way we have, what would you now do? If your priorities had been so out of whack for the last five years and you had not realised that you had 2,000 extra public servants and you had spent money on all sorts of projects and you had managed the territory’s finances in such an inefficient manner, what would you now do?” We would not have done what this government have done, and we will not do that when we are in government. We will manage things in an efficient way. We will prioritise. We will look at tax relief where it is appropriate and where it can be funded. But we certainly will not do things the way that this government has and we certainly would not put the territory in the fiscal position that it is now in as a result of this government’s poor decision making.
The substantive part of the motion is about an acute rental shortage. I do not think there is any dispute about that. We read about the queues of people for prime rental properties—queues of up to 100 for one or two rental properties, which is crazy. There is no doubt that we have an acute rental shortage in the ACT and that that is an issue. We have people sleeping out and queuing up to get these properties. If you speak to any young people who have looked to rent a property in the ACT recently, they will tell you countless stories about the difficulty of finding a property. The discussion recently around auctioning rental properties is symptomatic of a rental crisis; there is no doubt about that. We would not have those kinds of discussions if it had not got to this point.
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