Page 1990 - Week 05 - Thursday, 3 May 2012
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choose to. This is something that has been taken away from these people. The government is saying to them: “You will never have that. You can have land rent.”
We had a broker commenting on it. They said, “How the government were misguided enough to actually introduce the legislation in the first place is way beyond me, because if they knew anything about lending practices they would realise that it has nothing to do with global economic crises or anything like that.”
But there is more. Even the Auditor-General thought that the land rent scheme was a bad idea and represented a risk to the territory. The Auditor-General’s report said that the crux of the affordability problem in the ACT was this:
Land development and supply policy and programs in recent years have not been effective in achieving the Government’s stated objectives, which include meeting demand, providing affordable land and housing and establishing an inventory of serviced land …
Despite the current accelerated land programs, there was evidence of a shortage of the supply of residential land, capable of being built on, to meet the pent-up and on-going strong demand.
We know that there have been residents vocally criticising the scheme—perhaps no-one more eloquently than RS Gilbert of Braddon. He said that “under such a scheme the benefit of increases in the land’s value over the years would accrue to the Government rather than the lessee, thus leaving the lessee with equity only in the house itself”. He said, “And as Australia’s biggest mortgage insurer explains, that’s insufficient to get a loan.”
Just recently, perhaps in the last few days, we received the following correspondence:
Like most Australians we have found it hard to save for a deposit because of the high rent we have to pay not to say we are unhappy with our current rental we are very happy here. We heard of the land rent scheme …
We went to the compulsory seminar about the land rent scheme only to find that we were the only people there who were first time buyers, and a large majority of people where not from Canberra but from Sydney looking at getting a second property. This I found most strange as the whole point of the scheme is to help people get into the property market not for the benefit of people already in the market.
That is a good point. The correspondence continued:
Since then we have been busy trying to get land from the ballot as well as a home loan and have found that only two lenders will deal with the land rent scheme and that causes another problem in itself. CPS and bank Mecur are the only lenders that will lend for the land rent scheme.
So we see problems across the board. From some questions we have asked in relation to the progress of the land rent scheme, we have also seen that we are seeing some problems emerging. In 2008-09, of the 58 contracts exchanged, none were handed
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