Page 957 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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In 2005-06, the LDA spent almost $3 million on marketing and advertising. This is advertising for a monopoly provider. It is not like they were selling something that there was a lot of competition for. They were the only developer of residential development in town. They were the only developer under the previous regime. So to spend $3 million on all sorts of advertising and marketing was completely over the top.
We saw the LDA spend $34,000 on a sign and $12,000 on landscaping around the sign. We saw it spend $55,000 creating an advertisement—just the development of the ad. We saw it spend $60,000 playing the ad in cinemas and $123,000 on a temporary site office when the industry standard for these site offices is about $30,000. It is a large, bloated organisation operating as a monopoly that has failed to rein in spending. This has culminated in the ACT collapsing under the weight of the greatest housing affordability crisis seen since self-government.
How can we possibly call this responsible expenditure? We have to look at the record of the LDA. Did the LDA, for all the hype around its creation, deliver affordable housing? No. That has now been acknowledged by the Chief Minister. Were they ready to respond to the spikes in demand? Clearly, they were not. What were the tangible benefits received from the LDA? Well, not many. Certainly for the average Canberran there are very few.
These failures must be considered in the context of the Chief Minister’s comments on radio a couple of weeks ago when he acknowledged that the LDA had been getting most of its profits—a lot of its profits—by gouging first home buyers. That was a tacit acknowledgement by the Chief Minister. He said he would be happy now to forgo some of the profits that the LDA has been receiving if it meant that first home buyers did not have to pay so much for their home. The flipside of that is that they have been paying too much for their first home to prop up the LDA’s profits. There is no other way of looking at it. First home buyers have been forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars more than they would have otherwise because of the system set up by this government and because of the operation of this agency.
Planning system reform was launched by the government in 2004, some three years ago. Since planning began there have been 60 initial submissions, 260 documented comments, a further 27 submissions after consultations and 48 recommendations to the bill from the planning and environment committee. The planning system reform process, in the minister’s own words, is the most significant reform to planning legislation since self-government, aimed at making the planning system in the ACT simpler, more effective and faster.
In the midst of this, after thousands of man hours developing this system the Chief Minister decided to reshuffle the cabinet and change the planning minister. We are about to deliver the most significant change to our planning laws in the history of self-government and the planning minister gets turfed! I have differed with Simon Corbell on a lot of issues around land development, in particular the Land Development Agency, but I am on the record as saying that the work of the planning system reform process is largely a good thing. It is a complex process and a complex piece of legislation that he was charged with bringing through. And, before it
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