Page 3443 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 September 2019
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been banging on about for years and years: the supply of low cost community facility land for community groups that cannot afford to buy land at market prices. This is the land that is known as concessional leasehold.
This land is required by groups that create social value rather than monetary value. I agree with Mr Parton that there simply is not enough of it. I would like to quote one particular part of the explanatory statement of the bill we are debating today that explains exactly what that means:
Social value is the term used to describe the additional value (non-monetary in nature) created in the delivery of a service which has a wider community or public benefit. This extends beyond the social value delivered as part of the primary service or activity. ‘Social value’ captures the concept of the positive impacts on the economic, social and environmental well-being of the area.
There are two areas of concessional land issues where the Greens have been particularly concerned: first, the supply of land in new suburbs; and second, the steady erosion of the existing supply of land through deconcessionalisation, which converts it to a standard lease. As this bill basically covers the first of these two issues, I will focus my speech on those issues.
Over the past decade, the large majority of community facility sites released have been sold on the open market. The only community uses where people can afford to buy sites on the open market are those which will also be profitable. They are childcare centres, private health centres and private aged care facilities. They do have their purpose in life, but they are not the only community facilities we should be having. They are all worthy, but they are not reliant on land zoned for community facilities. Childcare centres and health centres are usually located on commercial zoned land. Private aged care facilities can afford to buy residential zoned land.
The result has been a long period where community facility zoned land release has been operating as a specialist kind of market land release. This approach has seen a large part of the Canberra community missing out. These are community groups—the arts groups, the charity groups, and the religious groups which Mr Parton mentioned—that cannot afford to buy land on the open market. Very few sites have been released for these kinds of organisations in the past decade.
Take Molonglo Valley in my electorate as an example. Residents regularly tell me that the area lacks community facilities. There is some community facility provision—child care and a medical centre—but there is no space for community life. There are no multicultural groups. There are no arts groups. There are no scouts and guides. That is because there just is no land for any of these groups to set up on. Basically, all they have is occasional use of the school, which is not enough, and the tiny Stromlo cottage. The SLA requires ones of its staff members to be always present at the cottage when it is used, so it is prohibitively expensive for the community to use.
This is a huge departure from Canberra’s past. In the past, we used to set aside land for community groups for the social value that it would provide. As a result, there are huge mixes of these groups in Canberra. This is one of the big strengths of the older suburbs of Canberra.
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