Page 2278 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
after the estimates report, it would indicate that the government did not want them as part of the report in relation to this matter.
This is about transparency. The government cannot sit there and hide. We have the question on notice. They come back and simply refer to the freedom of information request. They say that they sought an exemption, that there was a chance to respond to it and that we did not exercise that right. This issue embarrassed the Chief Minister sufficiently—
Mr Stanhope: I am not a bit embarrassed.
MR SESELJA: He was significantly embarrassed. We saw it on the day when we saw the front page of the Canberra Times, we saw it in his performance in estimates, and we saw it in his amazing response to my earlier speech this evening: the Chief Minister fired up and fired all sorts of things across the chamber.
Mr Mulcahy: It’s the lunar eclipse.
MR SESELJA: It must be the lunar eclipse. We do see the sensitivity of the Chief Minister on this issue.
I turn quickly to the LDA and some of the wasted spending that we have seen in the past. Earlier I referred to the issue around housing affordability. In a speech in 2002 in this chamber, the planning minister spoke about how the LDA was going to contribute significantly to housing affordability. We know that it has failed significantly. It has failed significantly because of the failure to release a sufficient amount of land.
Time and time again, in addition to the failure of this concept and the failure to put enough land out there, we have seen the wasted marketing and wasteful spending of the LDA. In 2005-06 we saw $915,000 spent on marketing Wells Station. This was a monopoly land developer at the time. We saw $516,000 spent on the marketing of Ginninderra Ridge. The Wells Station site office—$123,000, not to mention the landscaping, which took it up closer to $200,000. The EpiCentre sign—$50,000. Branding exercises at the movies—$115,000. In addition to the LDA’s failure of policy, all of these demonstrate contempt in terms of spending taxpayers’ money. This is money that really added nothing to the bottom line, because people had nowhere else to go to get their land. You can market it all you like, but they are still going to go to the same place. It is not actually getting you any extra value. Likewise there was the EpiCentre sign. We saw $50,000 spent on a sign so that people driving past might somehow be attracted to bid for this site.
This has been wasteful. It has been a failure of policy. It has been a significant failure of policy. It is perhaps for this reason that the Chief Minister belatedly acted and first took the LDA away from the planning minister and then eventually was forced to sack him. But that was not before we saw a significant burden placed on first home buyers in the territory, and that is a burden that continues to this day.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .