Page 97 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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better. We have a change of Chief Minister, but the mismanagement goes on. “The ACT is no stranger to waste,” said an article in the Australian newspaper a few months ago. Reviewing the legacy of 10 years of Stanhope government, the article says:
What a growing number of residents find irksome is that while Canberrans pay the highest rates and taxes of any jurisdiction in Australia, the Labor-Greens coalition’s concentration on its ideological agenda has been at the expense of ordinary services such as transport and water.
That was last year. Last week we had the Treasurer admitting that they had failed on the housing affordability front. As the Canberra Times reported on 8 February this year:
The ACT government says the capital’s housing affordability crisis has divided the city into “two Canberras”, split between winners and losers in the property market.
And Economic Development Minister Andrew Barr has flagged moves to impose even higher levels of affordable housing on the building sector in a renewed bid to tackle the city’s great divide.
The minister may have set himself on a collision course with the region’s house builders by flagging that he would prefer a slight oversupply of housing blocks in the face of hints from industry that the government should take its “foot off the accelerator,” on land releases.
Canberra’s leading affordable housing entrepreneur says he disagrees with the government’s two pillars affordable housing strategy—supply and distribution.
Mr Barr has told an Assembly committee that the city’s housing market had created a divide between the double-income professional families who inhabited the top 50 per cent of the market and everyone else.
“Clearly, where there has been an undersupply in the marketplace has been at the affordable end of the housing market,” Mr Barr told the multi-party committee.
As the opposition leader, Zed Seselja, and the Canberra Liberals have said repeatedly, Canberra’s affordable housing crisis has come about due to restricted land supply, a broken planning system, poor infrastructure, higher taxes and a lack of competition. So much for the affordable housing action plan of 2007 and its dozens of recommendations.
We come to last week and the admission, or realisation, from this Treasurer that “Canberra: we have a problem.” His solution? To blame someone else and put the onus for a solution on the building industry. At the Assembly committee hearing the economic directorate director-general conceded that none of the six development fronts underway around the capital were currently construction ready.
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