Page 830 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017

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(3) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) review the current taxation treatment on vacant properties, with a view to extending current land tax requirements to cover all properties unless they are owner occupied, agricultural or charity owned as in Victoria;

(b) research and provide details on the number of properties in the ACT that are left vacant for a period of six months or more and consider a vacancy tax such as has been proposed in Victoria; and

Housing affordability is one of the biggest economic and social issues that Australia faces. It is an issue the Greens have been fighting to address for as long as I can remember. The motion I am bringing forward today has two positive features: it makes our taxation system fairer and it will improve housing affordability.

For too long the taxation system has benefited investors over home owners. This trend will continue until the Australian government moves to address both negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. But, in the meantime, we can make some improvements in Canberra for Canberrans.

One of the key points that is often lost in this debate, but it is not one that the Greens lose sight of, is that for the most disadvantaged households housing affordability in fact means the availability of affordable houses for rent. I remember back about 15 years ago a normal vacancy rate was considered to be somewhere between three per cent and five per cent. In February 2017, according to SQM Research, there was a rental vacancy rate of 1.1 per cent in the ACT, and it rarely even gets to three per cent.

Of course, that figure is only calculated on properties that are on the market and available for rent. This is really why we are having this conversation. We cannot have a serious conversation about Australia’s housing affordability crisis without addressing the fundamental drivers that permit and, even worse in some cases encourage, owners to leave what may be a significant proportion of the housing supply to waste because we are now in the absurd situation that investors are buying properties purely to benefit from capital gains with no intention to rent them out.

Why should you bother with messy tenant issues when you can buy property, make a capital gain, have that capital gain attract a very minor tax, half-rate tax? From a tax point of view, it is a little winner. These are the properties that are denied to tenants by landlords that have little motivation to generate any rental income. The result is a lowering of vacancy rates. Every home held off the rental market means someone queuing day after day trying to get a home in the January rush. It means rents are a little bit higher than they would be otherwise.

Eventually these things flow through to the market and result in homelessness. Let me be clear here: this motion is not targeting those property investors who have a property that is temporarily vacant while they are looking for a tenant. They are doing

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