Page 172 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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money together and worked cooperatively, worked as part of a community, to improve the centre of Civic, everyone would applaud. But the government cannot impose community spirit. The government cannot, by legislative fiat, create social capital. You create social capital, you create community spirit, by having the community coming together voluntarily. This bill, this piece of legislation, fails all those tests.
It is not virtuous for the people in Civic to pay their levy to the government to come up with this scheme. It would be virtuous, it would be good for the community, it would be good for the social capital of Civic and it would be good for the community of people who come and use Civic if people voluntarily contributed to it because they could see a benefit. Shop owners have talked to me about the state of the footpaths, the state of graffiti, the state of billposting, the state of the quality of the buildings and the finish of the buildings in Civic. Some of the paint jobs are pretty ordinary—Mr Corbell is right—but, if a paint job is ordinary, that is the responsibility of the person who owns the block of land on which that building stands. Yes, there might be more than one person owning that block of land, but we do have unit title legislation here, we do have bodies corporate, and that is the responsibility of the private land owner.
If the minister is offended by the quality of the finish on the Melbourne Building or on any other building, he has the capacity to do something about it, the same as the Minister for the Territory and Municipal Services has the power to do something about graffiti on private buildings. The government really needs to get off its hands and do some of the work called out for. You see it time and again. I was walking through Civic recently and a property owner in Civic was pointing out the filthy state of the footpaths in various places. We have a drought and we do not go around steam cleaning the footpaths as much as we might have once and we do not sweep them as much as we once did, but these are basic services that should be provided by municipal services.
That has been cutback year by year and we are now actually justifying this cutback in a way by saying that the services are not up to scratch and some of the people in Civic are unhappy about the level of municipal services, so we will address that, not by improving the municipal services for which we all pay taxes, but by imposing another tax, another tax which will come out to all of us. Okay, the property owners will pay it initially, but they will pass it on to their tenants—the dentists, the accountants, the lawyers, all of those people who do not rely on an active street frontage to build up their business—and those things that should be done by the public will be done by the private and those costs will be passed on to me when I go to see my dentist, my accountant or my lawyer. That will be the case for everybody else who happens to have an office in Civic. Those costs will be passed on to the average mum or dad who needs to see a dentist, to take their children to an orthodontist or to see a lawyer. Those costs will be passed on because Simon Corbell and John Hargreaves cannot get their act together and exercise the powers that they already have under existing legislation.
We had Mr Corbell talking about the interaction of the public and the private realms—nice planning terms that he likes to use—but he has not given us one concrete reason to justify this tax of $1.2 million a year which will be inefficiently
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