Page 957 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
declined because the government is charging too much for land, as the sole supplier and now in some cases the partner in deals, and the fees and charges and the planning system militate against housing affordability.
The land rent scheme is a sham; it is a scheme on a life support system. That only one person in eight months has been able to get finance clearly indicates that in its entire life—not because of the global financial crisis; in its entire life—it has not been supported by the financial institutions. At the end of the day the scheme has to be a scheme that banks and institutions will lend on confidently or it will fail. And that is why it is failing. It is not the global financial crisis, which will be trotted out as the excuse of choice of all Labor governments across this country, particularly here in the ACT. This scheme failed before the full impacts of the global financial crisis were settling in.
What the opposition wants is for the land rent scheme to go to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts for inquiry and report. It can be a broad ranging inquiry. We have left this just to move it to the committee; it will be up to the committee to come up with further terms of reference. It can look at ways of making it work better. It can go and talk to the banks and the financial institutions. It can ask people—the 39 frustrated families that the senior public servants spoke about in the Canberra Times on the weekend—who have not been able to use this scheme to realise their dream of homeownership.
Perhaps half of all Canberra households might come forward—the $75,000 gross income disabled households that the Chief Minister speaks about, which represent half of the households in the ACT, who have now been slammed by the Chief Minister for their lack of income. It is appalling that he thinks that half of the households in the ACT cannot afford to buy their own homes—in a city that he has run for seven years, under policies that he has implemented and passed. So it is important that this goes to a committee. It is important there is an inquiry. It is important that the Assembly debates this further.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (11.41): I am rising to oppose Mr Smyth’s amendment. Basically, as we see it, the bottom line is that this scheme needs more work on it, and the people who can do the work on it are the government. The PAC is not in a position to make the commercial arrangements which would appear to be what are needed to progress this scheme.
The other issue is the timeliness. Ms Bresnan’s amendment requires the government to report back to the Assembly by the first sitting week in June and I am not confident that PAC would be in a position to meet that time frame, given the estimates coming up for both the third appropriation bill and the budget itself.
I totally agree with the Liberal Party that this is an important issue but I think it is an important issue which at this point of time the Assembly should continue to ask the government to progress; it is in a much better position to progress it than PAC is. So the Greens do not support this amendment. We support the government getting on with the amendment that Ms Bresnan has moved.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .