Page 946 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR SPEAKER: Order!
Mr Hargreaves: Mr Speaker, I am having a lot of difficulty hearing the Chief Minister.
MR SPEAKER: The Chief Minister’s time has now expired. Mr Smyth, you have the floor.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.57): Mr Speaker, it is interesting that we have this debate because, if you go to the academics and the expert that Mr Stanhope wants to quote, I do not see on the bottom of any application form for a home loan, “This has been approved by an academic.” It is well and good to quote academics who live in their academic world but in the cold, hard reality, in the light of day, when you and your partner go to the bank and you sit before the bank manager, the bank manager says, “Yes you can have the money,” or, “Sorry, no, you cannot.” The reality is this: people presenting to banks asking for a loan under Jon Stanhope’s and Katy Gallagher’s land rent scheme cannot get a loan. And that is the problem.
But if you go to people who actually understand how housing affordability works, people like UDIA, the Urban Design Institute of Australia, they say in their most recent report that the things that cause housing to be unaffordable in the ACT are the cost of land and the fees and charges in the planning system operated by the government. If you had a government that actually cared about the dream, that cared about the disabled households in the ACT who earn less than $75,000, surely you would address the things that are causing the problem. When Jon Stanhope, Ted Quinlan and Katy Gallagher came to office, housing was affordable in the ACT. It was some of the most affordable housing—the ACT. But because of Jon Stanhope’s taxation policies of “squeeze them until they bleed but not until they die”, we have created, the government has created, this problem in the ACT. The land rent scheme will not address the fundamental of housing affordability because it does not address the cost of land and the fees and charges paid.
I have to take exception to what the Chief Minister said in his answer yesterday, “So we have looked for a way to deal with that disability,” the disability of household income in the ACT. He said if you earned $75,000 or less in your household income then you are in some way disabled. That is an insulting use of the word. But it is insulting to half of the households in the ACT. The outcome shows that half of all households in the ACT in 2005-06 had gross household incomes below $75,000. According to Jon Stanhope, half of all ACT households are disabled. And he has disabled them. He has created this problem. He has created this stress in the market.
We had the spat between the Minister for Planning and the Chief Minister. They had the levers in their control and they shut down the land supply, exacerbating the problem. They increased fees and put in place a planning system that did not allow things to go ahead. That is the problem, that is why we believe that this motion should be passed today and that is why indeed, through my amendment, we believe that this land rent scheme should go to a committee for inquiry.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .