Page 2233 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 August 2017
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One thing I would say, though, is that the government has foreshadowed that the topic for this is going to be third-party insurance. I recognise that this is important. I suspect that probably everyone in this room has a third-party insurance policy. However, I also suspect that very few people in Canberra are passionately interested in this. So I am hopeful that we can think of some more exciting topics to talk about than third-party insurance. Otherwise we really do run the risk of boring the people of Canberra.
I move on to recommendation 22, which states:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government review the priority and resourcing given to complaints about non-compliance with approved Development Applications and report its conclusions to the relevant Standing Committee during 2017 annual report hearings.
It is with some melancholy that I read this out, because I am in fact chair of the relevant standing committee. We went through all of this already in annual reports earlier this year. Since then, I have continued to have a trickle of complaints coming to my office. I am confident that many other MLAs are in the same situation. The public are feeling that their complaints about non-compliance with DAs simply go nowhere. This is just not good enough. I do not know why the problem is there, but the problem certainly is there. It does not appear to be getting better in any way. I look forward to the government’s report to the planning committee, but even more than that I look forward to the government doing better in this regard.
I turn to recommendation 30. This is an area that the ACT Greens have been banging on about for some time. The committee recommended, and the Greens have been fighting for this for some time, that the ACT government set a minimum level of local content for all events facilitated by EventsACT to ensure that Canberra-based artists and producers actually benefit from government investments in events. The government does spend a substantial amount of money on events that are great for local residents and also great from a tourism point of view. But there is no reason why much of the artistic content of that cannot be local. We would like to see the government set a minimum level of local content for this so that the benefits from these events are long lasting within the community.
I will next move to the lease variation charge changes, which Mr Wall also touched upon in his comments. I would like to note, to start off, that over the last five years there have been 127 applications for lease variations, which would then be codified. In the three weeks between when the budget was put out and the end of June there were 147 applications for the same class of lease variations to increase the number of residences. I think there are quite a number of things that went wrong with the government’s proposed changes to the lease variation charge. Recommendation 45 is relevant not just for the lease variation charge. It states:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government should not make significant changes to the taxation system without public consultation and modelling of the impacts of the change. This modelling should not just include financial impacts.
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