Page 167 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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Association, which has advanced this proposal for many years now. The association advanced it under the previous government and the previous government was not interested. It has advanced it under this government. I am delighted and thankful for the association’s support also.
There have been a few misunderstandings in this debate that need to be addressed. The first is the suggestion that this is a tax. This is not a tax. We are in a situation where we have property owners in the city centre who are saying, “We want to have a mechanism that collects money that can be spent for our direct benefit in the area where we own our property.” It is not something that will be collected and sucked into general revenue for spending on ovals, road maintenance, schools, hospitals or whatever. It is a very specific levy to be collected for the purpose of enhancing the public and private realm in the city centre. This levy will be collected to achieve those purposes.
What is really important is that the government’s only role in this process will be to facilitate that collection. It will not be the government’s money. It will not be kept in consolidated revenue. This money will be collected from the levy holders and then given back to the levy holders to spend. That is what this mechanism is about. The government will not make decisions in specific detail about how the money will be spent. To answer the questions put forward by Dr Foskey, these are the issues that members need to understand. This is not government expenditure. This is levy-holder expenditure. They, through a democratically elected body, will determine how the money is to be spent, consistent with the broad objectives that the government sets out through the grant program that will be used to administer it. That is why the government cannot tell you that $10,000 will be spent on this and $50,000 will be spent on that. It will be for the levy payers to determine that, not for anybody else.
Mr Stefaniak issued the challenge, “Show me where this has worked.” He highlighted the example of Darwin. There are 300 cities across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States that have these mechanisms and they work, and they work successfully. Just last year, we had Dr Paul Levy from Philadelphia come and visit the ACT. He spoke to the business community, he spoke to property owners and he spoke to government. He may have even spoken to members of the opposition; I am not quite sure. He runs the business levy scheme that Philadelphia put in place. Philadelphia was suffering the typical malaise of American cities: the hollowed-out city centre, everyone fleeing to the suburbs, no pride and no investment in the city centre and lack of business confidence in the city centre.
They put in place this levy scheme. Over time, it has grown and grown significantly in terms of the amount of money that it captures for public and private improvement and it has proven to be an overwhelming success. The experience that Dr Levy related was an overwhelmingly positive one of enhanced city pride, better public spaces, greater ownership of the city centre and a willingness from both the private sector and the public sector to invest in the city centre.
That leads me to my next point. City centres take time to build and create and city centres work best when there is a partnership between those who have a direct material interest in the return they get from their investment, the property owner in a city centre, and the public and the government, which have a direct interest in having
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