Page 2095 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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When you do start to think about it, I suggest, Mr Coe, that you might like to look at a question on notice from the planning committee when we did our inquiry into the planning strategy, in passing on the cost of developing greenfield versus infilled land. I put that as a question on notice. There is a fascinating document where the ACT government has gone through the cost of developing land in greenfield areas and infill areas in the ACT. It is fascinating. I commend it to the Liberal Party—in fact, to anyone in Canberra. The bottom line is that it is a lot cheaper to use the spaces that we already have—in other words, to densify in our existing urban areas rather than go out to the greenfield areas.
Another thing I would point out, to both the Liberals and the Labor Party, is that we do have an issue with growth in the ACT and worldwide. It clearly is not sustainable for the world to keep on growing our population and consumption at the rate we are. This is the fundamental reason why we are ending up with the environmental challenges we have. This is the fundamental driver behind our climate change issues.
Mr Coe’s argument basically was that we are going to grow forever and the fact that this is going to lead to real costs is somehow wrong and we should not be stopping growing forever. The Greens recognise we live on one planet; there is no extra planet that we can get resources from. We are already in the situation where the world as a whole is using the resources of more than one planet. The people of the ACT are using resources—I do not have the numbers in front of me, because I was not expecting this from Mr Coe—at a rate about 3½ times the rate of the average person in the world. Whatever the exact figure is, it is a large and unsustainable figure.
That is my first problem with Mr Coe’s speech. Next, going to the selective numbers, he talks about rates and land tax rises, but he does not talk about the abolition of insurance duty or the cuts to stamp duty rates.
Further, Mr Coe blames the ACT government for the price of land doubling between 2011 and now. I have spoken about some of the land issues, but I should have pointed out that he does not actually say that the price of land has also doubled in Sydney over that period under a Liberal state government. The Liberal state government might be having the same sorts of problems that the ACT does in terms of producing new land out of nowhere. I do not know what they are thinking about. He does not say that the price of land has also doubled in Melbourne over that period, for years in which there was a Liberal state government. He does not mention that the price of land has been growing very quickly across all of Australia for almost the whole period since 1999.
What is the common thread here? There are two common threads. One, as I talked about, is unsustainable growth for our whole world. The other common thread is the federal Liberal tax policies: negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. The year 1999 is significant, because it is the year that the Howard federal government introduced the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount, which, coupled with negative gearing, has turned housing into a speculative investment rather than a necessity of life. That is one of the substantive issues in terms of housing and homelessness.
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