Page 4092 - Week 13 - Thursday, 6 December 2007
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the private sector letting them down. Perhaps the government made the wrong choice. I think both ministers should answer whether or not enforcing the lease that the trust was issued with was looked at. Why is it that they were allowed to stall for 17 months?
There is the Calvary hospital debacle presided over by ministers Stanhope and Corbell. Here we have the Chief Minister slandering Calvary, saying, “It is all their fault that it took so long. We gave them a DA, but they did not do anything with it.” It is just not true. They waited and waited, year after year, after the initial approval for that sale was given in August 2001. I was in the cabinet when it was made.
Here we have the government’s response. The government have reports in 2001 and 2002 and a progress report in 2005, saying there is a problem coming. They know there is a problem; they have recognised there is a problem; they purport to have solutions but they fail in the most fundamental solution, which is to address the supply side. Minister Gallagher got it right. She will probably get chastised for this by her Chief Minister, but Ms Gallagher says—and she is quite right—that land shortages are behind the bottlenecks in the system. The land shortages come straight back to the minister responsible for the LDA. We all know who that is. He bolted from the chamber yet again. I think this lies fairly and squarely at the Chief Minister’s feet.
We know that the policy initiative was to squeeze land buyers in the ACT till they bled. We see that in the contrived tightening in the market, where, for the first time in almost seven years, the number of blocks sold drops below a thousand—it drops 40 per cent, to below a thousand—to 579 blocks. Indeed, in the following year, 2006-07, the number of multiunit sales drops. Let us see. It goes from 780 dwelling sites to 201 dwelling sites, to 234 dwelling sites, to 150 dwelling sites, to 320 dwelling sites. In 2006-07, 85 dwelling sites were sold by this government. That is only 700 sites down on the sales that were done in our last year in government, 2001-02.
If there is a problem, the problem is in supply. Who is in charge of supply? The monopoly supplier. Who is the monopoly supplier? The ACT government. As UDIA say in their report:
The Australian Capital Territory Government’s Affordability Strategy is also well intended but its target of 15 per cent of new homes in new estates being priced between $200,000 - $300,000 may in the end be subsidised by other houses …
It is difficult to achieve. (Time expired.)
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.30): The expansion of the ACT population and the creation of new residential areas present great challenges for us in coming years. Sustainable development has been the call of the international community for over two decades now. Unfortunately, this has not yet translated in the ACT. Our new suburbs are simply still not sustainable. Forde is certainly getting there but we still have a long way to go.
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