Page 3028 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 15 September 2015
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poor people out at Charnwood or other poor communities in this city. He is ripping money out of them through the pokie money and giving it to the Labor Party, the 1973 Foundation, who are property developers themselves; the 1973 Foundation, the funding wing of the Labor Party.
As I understand it, they do most of their development in Sydney. Is that right? I think they do it in Sydney. Maybe they did not want to pay the lease variation charge. Maybe they looked at it and thought, “Let’s do some development in Woden or in Tuggeranong or in the CBD. No, why invest all that money we’ve ripped out of the people in Charnwood and Weston Creek? Why invest that money in Canberra when we can avoid the lease variation charge and go to Sydney?”
Shame on the Labor Party; shame on this government. There he is ripping the money from the poor and giving to the rich. Those are developers. People say, “Oh, the developer mates of the Liberal Party.” Well, let us talk about the developer mates of the Labor Party—the 1973 Foundation, or the Tradies group. My understanding is that they are involved in a little bit of development themselves. That is my understanding. They are developers in this town. I wonder what they think about the lease variation charge. They are probably a little bit conflicted when it comes to it with the comrades. It probably depends on which hat they have on when they come lobbying the Chief Minister about the latest development that they want to do.
The rank hypocrisy from those opposite, who sneer at those people who have built our city, when they themselves are developers, when they themselves are giving pokie money to build in Sydney and then reaping the money from the developments they are doing in Sydney to fund their election campaigns. Shame! This is the great story of this Labor Party and the CFMEU and the way they operate. Mr Barr has the audacity to sneer at people who want to do some good in the CBD or in our town centres.
There is no doubt, when talking about urban renewal, that in order to have urban renewal you have to have urban decay. We went to the forum last week. It was a shame that Labor Party members were not there. I recognise that Mr Rattenbury was. But I was there, Mr Coe was there and Mr Smyth was there talking about the CBD. When you talk about the decay, the decline and the many comments about this in the CBD and our town centres and you have had a government for 14 years, who could possibly be responsible? Here he is, Mr Barr, going around talking about his urban renewal agenda when it is his mob who have allowed this decay in our town centres and the CBD to occur.
What is their response? It is to sneer at the developers, to sneer at the very people who have built this city in the past. Sadly, like their mates in the 1973 Foundation, they are looking for opportunities elsewhere because it is so difficult to build in this town, be it through the quagmire of planning regulations, the LDA and some of its decisions or the tax regime that we all understand is not working and that is providing perverse outcomes. It is driving entrepreneurship, renewal and ultimately jobs out of this territory.
There is much to be done. Mr Coe spoke well about the lease variation charge and the need to fix that. It is not just about densification; it is also about affordability. As
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