Page 2001 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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I am not sure what she was saying; it does not read properly—
or the scheme will fall on its head if people cannot get the money to build.
And then we did have a ray of sunshine. On 21 August 2008, we had an email from Elisabeth Judd to CMD’s David Dawes and George Tomlin. Judd states:
Wizard have come on board for land rent.
Of course, later, on 26 August, we have Wizard, Manuka, stating:
Well, actually we have a hiccup in the process, this being the risk part of the acceptance loan process. They are an independent part and are not comfortable with the inability of the bank to have the security on the land.
It was two days later that Jon Stanhope went out, after his officials had been getting all this correspondence, and made his statement. In fact, we see a trail of correspondence where representatives of CMD are desperately seeking endorsement of the scheme; they want someone to confirm support and they are finding it extraordinarily difficult to get anyone to come on board. So we have got officials out there seeking it; we have got a trail of emails going right back to 2004 raising serious concerns.
When Jon Stanhope is asked about it six weeks prior to the election he says, “I have no reason to believe there are any concerns.” He says, “On the undertakings we have from financial institutions, there is no reason to believe other than that they will support land rent.” There is a whole raft of reasons for any reasonable observer to say, “Hang on; there are some serious concerns with this scheme. We have not got anyone signed up. We may have had some people in principle early on saying, ‘That sounds all right, we will take a look at that; let us have a look at that.’”
The legislation had already passed by this point. This was work, of course, that should have been done before the legislation was passed. But after the legislation was passed and we were seeing all these individuals struggling to get it, it was raised in the media as a serious and important issue prior to an election, whether this land rent scheme had legs. That was the fundamental here. What Jon Stanhope could have said, the honest thing to have said would have been, “There have been some concerns and we are continuing to pursue lenders to try to find someone who will sign up for the land rent scheme.” That would have been an honest answer. That would have been the correct answer and the honest answer that would not have misled the people of the ACT before the last election.
But what he chose to do instead was mislead—despite all this going on, despite the department running around desperately trying to find someone to come on board. And good luck to the public servants; they were doing the job they were asked to do, seeking assistance for this scheme that the government had signed up to, and they could not get them to come on board. We had lender after lender after lender saying they had concerns. In between time we would have had the odd lender saying, “It looks all right but we will need to look at it.” Indeed, to date, we still do not have anyone signed up.
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