Page 1579 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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making housing unaffordable for young people. Never have we seen in recent times the prospect of young people going backwards so quickly than they have by the actions of Simon Corbell and this government.
Simon Corbell set up the Land Development Agency and then instructed them and instructed the policymakers not to release land, to slow down land supply, to squeeze land supply. This was a deliberate decision. This was not accidental. This was not something the government did not have control over. Simon Corbell went out there and made a deliberate decision to make it less affordable for Canberra families. He decided we did not need any land supply and that we would slow it right down. We saw the prices surge, and we saw the hopes and dreams of young Canberra families fading away as a result of the decision making of this government.
We have seen in planning the squeeze on land supply and the interference in the market through the Land Development Agency. We have seen the failure to deliver infrastructure on time. All of that is not sustainable planning. That is a failure to plan, and that failure to plan has serious consequences. We see it time and time again. Go and talk to young families. Go and talk to young people in Canberra about what they see as the biggest issues, and housing affordability, the cost of renting a place and the cost of buying a home are very high up on their list of concerns. They are concerns and problems that have been created through the failure to plan of ACT Labor. In fact, in the case of land supply, it was a deliberate decision by Simon Corbell and ACT Labor to make it more difficult, to make it more expensive, to deliberately squeeze land supply.
That has had serious consequences, to the extent that Andrew Barr now says they have created a two-class Canberra. That means there are second-class citizens, according to the Labor Party. In fact, they have created a class of people who are now finding it extremely difficult to buy a home in the ACT, and that is a great shame. That will be one of the shameful legacies of ACT Labor.
Unfortunately, their Greens alliance partners want to take them further down that destructive path. Let us look at Throsby, where that is on display in its most extreme form. Shane Rattenbury said in this place:
Throsby is the perfect case in point of the kind of area for which we should perhaps just put aside all notion of development … the Greens’ view is that Throsby may well be a complete no-go zone.
They have been backed by the Labor Party in that motion, and now we are seeing the consequences in Throsby where the number of blocks is being massively scaled back by the commonwealth. The commonwealth, I think, have taken their cues from the Labor Party and the Greens—a majority in this place—who seem to be expressing a view that we did not want to see development in Throsby. Well, the Canberra Liberals want to see sustainable development in Throsby. That does not mean no development in Throsby or very little development in Throsby.
We heard earlier from Ms Bresnan now saying Kowen Forest should not be developed as well. So they want to knock off things like Gungahlin Drive. They want to knock
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