Page 2521 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 2013
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projections around demand for residential land in the coming years are somewhat conservative.
We do recognise that we have a backlog of land release to proceed through, and there are of course a number of important environmental approvals that need to be obtained before the balance of land release can occur in Gungahlin in particular. We will go through a process of evaluation of the land release program every six months to ensure that we are keeping pace with market movements.
It is interesting that certainly the residential market in the territory has perhaps held up more strongly than many pundits anticipated, given the uncertainty in relation to the federal election result and what might happen to employment within the territory. The one observation I will make is that, regardless of who wins elections, in the medium and long term it would appear that governments of both political persuasions do in fact increase the size of the public service in the ACT over time, questioning the need really for very sharp contractions in any given period of time.
My evidence for this is that John Howard inherited about 37,000 public servants from Paul Keating and passed on 57,000 to Kevin Rudd. There are now 66,326 ACT-based commonwealth public servants. So in the last six years we have seen growth of about 10,000. There may well in fact be a reversal of that increase of 10,000 over the last six years in the short term. One would anticipate, though, that in the medium term federal governments would want to continue to implement programs and that, if you take a long-run view of the ACT housing market, its fortunes are most closely linked to the size of the commonwealth public service. I think in the medium term there is reason for optimism there. But we do not need a short-term hit of job losses in the order of 20,000.
MADAM SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Ms Lawder.
MS LAWDER: Treasurer, you have mentioned land releases in Molonglo, west Belconnen and Gungahlin. How many blocks of land does the government intend to release to meet its 2015-16 dividend forecast?
MR BARR: In the 2015-16 year, it is around the 4,000 mark. We have brought the land release target down a little from the previous budget in order to recognise changes in market conditions. As I indicated in my initial response to Ms Lawder’s question, we will adjust land release accordingly in each six-month period, depending on prevailing market conditions.
What has changed in recent times is that the level of population growth has increased from 1.9 to 2.3 per cent. To put some perspective on that, that is around another thousand people. At an average of about 2½ people per dwelling, 400 additional dwellings are required, just on the back of that population increase in recent times. We will closely monitor population data.
The other variable, of course, is the number of people per household, and that continues to shrink. In the ACT it has come down from about 2.7 to a little over 2.5. I imagine that trend will continue.
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