Page 1309 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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heard from the planning minister—and this is where I agree with the planning minister, and the planning minister would have heard my colleague Brendan Smyth talking about this often—is that the idea to be sustainable is not just about environmental sustainability; it is about social and economic sustainability. These things are important.
I want to talk about some of the economic aspects of the Greens’ proposals in relation to the Molonglo Valley. We know that they are advocating—and it is indeed in the Labor-Greens agreement, that document of which we are barely able to speak, it would seem, in this place, but it is in the agreement—10 per cent public housing. That includes in the Molonglo Valley. That is an expensive promise. That is a very expensive promise and we need to highlight what an expensive promise that is because we need to know where the money will come from.
The Labor Party is committed to this. The Greens are committed to this. But are they? That is the question. Are they really committed to it? Are they committed to spending the money? It has a cost and we need to put that on the record. Molonglo will have 30,000 homes, of which 10 per cent will be public housing—3,000 public houses.
A Treasury document, which is now about 18 months old, because it was around the time of the last election, said that an additional 1,200 houses would cost in the order of $500 million. We will take that as a reasonable estimate. It will depend how many units you did, how many standalone homes, but clearly in 18 months or so the price would have gone up somewhat. But we can take that as a pretty reasonable, solid estimate, give or take, so 1,200 houses would cost in the order of $500 million. Therefore an additional 3,000 houses, under the plan, would cost $1.25 billion, based on those costings.
As I say, you could go a little bit either way, depending on where building costs are at, depending on how many units and the like. But $1.25 billion would be the ballpark of what you would be looking at—in addition, of course, to the catch-up elements in the Labor-Greens agreement in relation to the rest of Canberra. If we have got currently less than 10 per cent—I think something like 8½ per cent—and you want 10 per cent in Molonglo Valley from the start, for every 1,000 houses there would be 100 that are public houses. That would be presumably rolled out in all of the suburbs—100 houses in each. So you will be funding that, plus you will be playing catch-up in order to get to 10 per cent in the rest of the city. That will include all the new greenfields developments in Gungahlin; it will include any other growth of housing stock in the city. So we are talking about very big numbers.
Indeed, we know the Productivity Commission’s review of government services says the ACT spends approximately $7,500 per year maintaining each of these houses. These houses in Molonglo would cost, therefore, over $22 million per year to maintain. These are the costs that the Greens did not mention.
I want to talk about seven-star energy efficiency. It needs to be said that there has been bipartisan support in the ACT for moving to stronger energy efficiency ratings in the territory. The move to six stars is something that, indeed, the Liberal Party led the way on in this place, I believe under my colleague Mrs Dunne’s leadership. We did advocate six stars. The question that we posed and the reason there was the sensitivity
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