Page 959 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
something to address this issue. There are some good initiatives there and some others that we have some concerns about. But it is an issue that undoubtedly this government over the past five years has contributed to significantly. It has contributed to the problem which it is now seeking to address through the failure of governance, the failure of a coherent land release policy and a failure to respond to spikes in demand that could easily have been anticipated. It simply was not ready to bring things on line.
The LDA has been quite unimaginative in a lot of its developments. Some people thought that the Village Building Company may have paid too much in west Macgregor, but we already see Mr Winnell saying he can produce 30 per cent affordable housing. A lot of creativity is going to come out of developments like that. But we have seen a distinct lack of creativity by the LDA in seeking to bring about affordable house and land packages in the territory. We simply have not seen it.
The moderate income land ballot of $160,000 for a 400-metre block, with very little choice in how things get done, is not providing genuinely affordable housing. I anticipate that with some freeing-up of the system and some competition being brought into the system hopefully we will see better outcomes, particularly for first home buyers, with fewer of them being locked out of the market and fewer people in housing stress, as has been acknowledged by the Chief Minister.
Mr Mulcahy: Working families that we need to look after.
MR SESELJA: Absolutely. Many of the people I know, many of my friends and relatives who have bought houses recently, have been forced to pay very, very high mortgages or are looking to buy and have simply been locked out because prices are so significant in the territory. For a long time when we asked this question, the Chief Minister would say, “We did very well in the housing affordability surveys.”
The fact is that it is extraordinarily difficult for first home buyers to buy a house in the ACT. It is true, absolutely true—it has been acknowledged by the Chief Minister now—that this government contributed to this situation. We are not alone. We are not alone in Australia in facing this issue. But we are uniquely placed. Because of the way our system is structured, our government is uniquely placed to influence housing affordability in a positive way, and it has simply failed to do that over the past five years.
Briefly in the time I have left I want to mention the ACT prison. The opposition’s views on the prison project are clear.
Mr Barr: They are all over the place, actually. One week it is too big; the next week it is too small.
MR SESELJA: Absolutely not. The figures, which I understand are still on Treasury’s website, are quite at odds with the ABS figures. One of the most difficult things has been to get any coherent information or any coherent data. But what we have seen is a scaling down of the prison, and that was to be anticipated.
The government’s management of major projects has been such that we would have expected this. Initially, it was going to be for 374; now it is going to be for 300 but
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .