Page 3238 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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in the land rent scheme for a couple of years wishes to dispose of the house. How do they dispose of the house? Do they negotiate separately? Does the buyer negotiate separately with the government on the one hand, which owns the land, and the owner of the house? How does that negotiation work?
I think that we will be seeing people getting quite a rude shock after a couple of years of the operation of this scheme. They will see that the price of their asset has gone down and that they have, in fact, in many cases lost money and potentially gone into negative equity. That is our great fear.
This is no solution to the housing affordability issue which this government has helped create; it is no solution. This government will continue, if it is re-elected, to charge extraordinary levels of taxation. It refuses to cut tax for first homebuyers for stamp duty; it will continue to mismanage the system.
Let us look at not just the LDA. Let us also look at the problems that are being experienced at the moment in ACTPLA. At the moment the feedback I am getting from people who are dealing with ACTPLA is that despite the legislative changes that we have seen, which the opposition supported because we believed the legislation was broadly on the right track, we are seeing unreasonable delays in building. We are seeing unreasonable delays in approvals with structures such as pergolas. It takes weeks to get a pergola approved. This is not just for punters; this is for professionals who rely on this business.
I have heard from groups such as Patio World who are under enormous pressure because of the delays in ACTPLA. Given the way that this has been handled, given the major stuff-ups we have seen in recent times from ACTPLA and given the significant ongoing delays, this of course affects housing affordability. All of these delays add to the costs for builders and developers, and those costs are inevitably passed on to first homebuyers.
If the cost of doing business continues to be pushed up by slow processes and poor processes then that will be passed on to homebuyers and that means the cost of building in the territory is higher than it should be, and it is. It will continue to be pushed up. Then we see this continuing situation where first homebuyers are seeing the dream of home ownership slip out of their grasp.
This is why we are seeing them move over the border. This is why we are seeing young people unable to purchase a home and unable to access that dream. The poor second-class citizen model that the Stanhope government is putting in place where they will allow people to buy a house without buying the land is a poor substitute for genuine home ownership. It is a poor substitute for the security and stability that comes for families from owning a house and land package, of having that patch of dirt which is their own, which they can plan around, which they can have for many years and see the gains that go with that.
This will now be a critical difference between the Stanhope government’s approach and the Liberal opposition’s approach. We do not believe in the land rent scheme. We do believe in taxation relief for first homeowners. We do believe in more competition,
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