Page 2969 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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I think it is worth again noting the contribution of the planning minister. This is someone who is charged with the planning of the territory, yet, for a speech in a portfolio area which does touch on his own portfolio, he came down here completely unprepared and was spouting falsehoods throughout. Mr Assistant Speaker, I think that that does bear some discussion.
I think the other thing is that, in the extraordinary economic analysis from the planning minister, what was not actually touched on was the fact that this is a tax that does influence behaviour. Putting aside how much it will impact on price, how much may be able to be absorbed by developers, how much will be coming off the bottom line of people’s existing property rights, all of which will be part of the mix here, there are choices. There are choices for the property sector as to where they develop. They can develop outside the ACT, where there are now lower taxes in things like stamp duty. They can also develop in greenfields instead of infill, where they do not face this tax.
So, even if one were to accept—and I think some of the assertions that have been made by the Labor Party in this debate are highly dubious—part of what they said, it does not take account of the fact that there are choices to be made even within the ACT. So the question for the government would be, if that is the case, are you happy for there to be a greater proportion going forward than there is currently of greenfields development versus infill?
If that is the government’s new position, I am interested to hear it, because I understood they were looking for a greater proportion of infill going forward. There is no doubt that, when individuals look at their options, a greenfield site suddenly looks more attractive than it did, when the tax on redevelopment of existing sites through change of use is ramped up. I do not know that anyone could actually dispute that that is the case. Likewise, when there are lower taxes in New South Wales, people will make those judgments.
We have not heard from any contributors in the Labor party about what impact that will have on those decisions, particularly when there is risk. There is risk in some of these developments. There is potentially a lot of delay. There is sometimes community opposition. All of these things need to be factored in. Now this is one great big giant increased tax to factor in, which will, of course, affect decision making. It will affect risk; it will affect the likely profit versus the potential downside. So again we have heard them ignore these facts.
Mr Speaker, it is disappointing again that the Greens and Labor have combined to effectively gut this motion. None of them have actually been able to speak to the substance of the motion. Of the ones who have tried, Ms Hunter, when she talked about industry, got it completely wrong and Mr Barr ended up having a go at his own colleague, the Treasurer, when he looked at a couple of words and did not realise that they were the Treasurer’s words rather than the Liberal Party’s words. It was an embarrassing performance.
Mr Speaker, we will continue to take this up, because it is important. It is important for home buyers, it is important for those looking to buy a unit, it is important for
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