Page 2495 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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This is about where people will live in this city and it is about the future of the city. If we slow down development in the inner areas and around the town centres, you have to build at the periphery, and that is urban sprawl. That is a contradiction of just about everything the Greens normally say on these issues. It is against the intentions of the government. Yet apparently that work has not been done. We do not know what the effect of this magical tax will be. To use your catchcries of “daytime branch of the Liberal Party” and “narrow sectional interests”, it is good fun and a nice debating technique, but it is not substance. It is not substance at all.
The minister talked about crowding out homebuyers. So we are talking about crowding out homebuyers but the problem—
Mr Barr: After an hour and a half, Brendan makes the call for substance.
MR SMYTH: The ridicule is always good. When you resort to ridicule, you know how close this is getting to the bone. The minister did say it will affect a small number. I would be interested to know what that small number is. We have never actually heard a number of how many people will be affected by this. We do not know what the impact of this legislation will be. We would say that it must affect those who want to purchase a new dwelling and renters. It logically must affect these people.
Mr Barr said the market will adjust. Again, we do not know how far or what the adjustment will be. If Mr Barr has that data, I would like to see it. If the Chief Minister and Treasurer has the data on what adjustments are required, I would like to see that as well. The Chief Minister makes the assertion, and has done when she ridicules others, that it will not drive down existing home prices, it will not increase new dwelling prices and it will not drive up rents. That is magic; it is just magic.
I am not sure why you would accept 17 pages of amendments from the Greens if you have got all of this right. And I am not sure why the Greens cannot explain what these 17 pages of amendments do. I listened to Ms Hunter and I thought: “Okay, she’s got two lots of 10 minutes; she’s got 20 minutes. She’ll at least make a fist of it. You could get a minute per page on each of the amendments and tell us what they actually do.” But we did not get that from Ms Hunter.
We get sighs at the far end. That is okay; sigh all you want. But we did not, and I am not surprised. She did not want to debate the amendments one by one. I think it is because she is not able to debate the amendments one by one. She is not able to make a case for them individually, because she certainly did not make a case for all of them to be moved as a lump and she certainly did not make a case, when she had her 10 minutes, as to what the effect of them will be. We are in the detail stage. You are meant to go to the detail. Something you never get from Meredith Hunter is the detail, and that is unfortunate.
But it is the style, and I guess we all accept that. I am surprised that the government accepts them in that way. But that is okay, because I think what it says is about the closeness of the two parties and that everybody gets a win out of this. The only losers in this are those who seek to buy a home or seek to rent a home, because what they will not get is relief from the high prices that they already pay.
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