Page 2011 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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Because of your vanity. You will not do it, because of your vanity. You have nailed your colours to this program and it is just not working.
Chief Minister, I urge you to back away from this scheme and actually support some substantial policy motions that will make housing affordability more accessible to average Canberrans. I urge all members of this place to support Zed’s original motion.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.32): The Chief Minister has shown once again why it is difficult for so many in the community to trust him. We see it time and time again. We see the stream of correspondence, going right back to 2004, which undermines all of the central planks of his arguments. We have seen his 28 August statement, where he had no reason to believe there were any problems with the land rent scheme. We have seen also his statement in June in the Assembly, which he needs to correct: “At no stage has any financial institution indicated the nature of the land rent scheme would provide an impediment to lending.”
Going back to 2004, we saw the Commonwealth Bank raising concerns, and we saw the same from Westpac and St George. It is summed up nicely by some of the emails from individual officers within the LDA: “Receiving a lot of phone calls from the public indicating that they are approaching financial institutions and being told constantly that either the financial institution will not lend money on a land rent crown lease or they are not willing to do anything till they know more about the scheme.” And another one: “It is imperative we find someone who will support the scheme or the scheme will fall on its head if people cannot get the money to build.”
They sum it up. What the Chief Minister is claiming is that either he was not getting any of this advice—that his office was not getting any of this advice, that they never spoke to officers within the Chief Minister’s Department or the Land Development Agency to find out what was going on—or that he got it but it gave him no cause for concern, no cause for concern whatsoever.
The response is pathetic. Nothing that the Chief Minister has brought back has actually contradicted anything in those documents. Nothing which the Chief Minister has brought back has changed the fact that he misled the people on 28 August 2008. It is a black-and-white case.
There was reason for concern right through the process. There was significant cause for concern. There was significant fear that it would fall over. That is why the officers were frantically chasing about. This is what one of the officers said: “We need to get a lender on board; otherwise it will fall on its head if they can’t get them.” The Chief Minister, apparently oblivious to this—or seeing this and not caring—went ahead and made the statement anyway, went ahead and defended the scheme, went ahead and claimed that things were on track when they were not and he knew it. He knew it; he must have known it.
Interestingly, we have not heard him actually address that point. Was he aware of this advice? Was he getting this advice from his office, from his departments? Were they telling him of these concerns? He has not addressed that. We can only assume that he was, because we know that on 29 August—we saw the correspondence—the correspondence said: “There is political pressure.”
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