Page 2323 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 5 June 2013
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It is largely a tragedy not because of market forces, but because of government intervention. It is because of this government’s excessive tax regime and because of this government’s poor record when it comes to delivering land to market. In addition to that, the government’s inability to deliver infrastructure to support residential land estates in addition to existing developments, existing suburbs, means that there is a continued pressure on the ACT housing sector, which drives prices up and up and therefore makes housing more and more inaccessible for Canberrans.
Dr Bourke has pointed to a few aspects which he believes would be beneficial for Canberra as stipulated in the budget. But all these schemes are in fact flawed schemes. They are schemes that have been there before and that have failed. What this government does over and over again is tinker with bad schemes. Rather than saying, “Enough is enough; it didn’t work,” they keep tinkering with them and keep tinkering with them so that they gouge more and more money out of the residents of Canberra.
One such scheme which is far from being what it was intended is the first home owner grant, which in government speak has been “re-targeted”. What that means is that thousands of people who purchase established houses here in the ACT are now going to miss out on the first home owner grant. The government’s changes, whereby they restrict first home owner grants to people who purchase new properties or substantially renovated properties, means that thousands of Canberrans who would want to purchase an existing property, who would want to purchase perhaps an ex-government property to do up, who would want to purchase an existing apartment, or who would want to purchase their first family home in an existing area—perhaps near to where they grew up—would now not get that support. All this is happening under the banner of re-targeting.
The same can be said for the homebuyer concession scheme, whereby once again we have a re-targeting. This means that thousands of people who would want to get the support that other Canberrans would have access to will not be able to get it because they are purchasing an existing property as opposed to a new or substantially renovated property.
This notion that you can purchase a substantially renovated property for under the threshold, which is 420,000, I think is very wishful thinking. It is pretty hard to get any property in Canberra for under $420,000, but to get one in an established area that has been substantially renovated, that is done up to a very high standard, under $420,000 I think is wishful thinking.
Yet again we see a change to land rent. This is a bad scheme. It was a bad scheme at the beginning. It was a bad scheme after the first iteration, and the second iteration, and the third iteration, and here we are for the umpteenth time looking at another iteration of land rent that I am sure would fail just as all the other ones have before.
We have mixed messages from the government, because on the one hand they are saying that we want people to live on transport corridors, we want people to live in built-up areas but not to put pressure on greenfield development, which supposedly is better for the environment. Yet their own schemes, of course, push people to greenfield developments.
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