Page 1483 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.33): The Greens will be supporting this bill. I will look at two issues in this speech: firstly, the bill itself and, secondly, the related issues of why we are doing this. The ACT has complex, legislated rules around how the ACT government can dispose of government-owned land—rules that are quite restrictive and subject to substantial scrutiny. For example, there is a quarterly schedule that members will have seen tabled in the Assembly which lists all the land sold using a direct sales process.
While I am sure these processes create a large amount of procedural work for the public service—and they must be frustratingly inflexible at times—they are very important. Why is this so? Because, around Australia, government land dealings are a high-risk area for maladministration and, at the extreme, corruption.
In the ACT over recent years we have had three highly critical Auditor-General’s reports into land dealings of the now disbanded land development agency. In New South Wales, government land dealings have come up in corruption investigations on several occasions over the last decade or so.
Aside from the land sale aspects of the University of New South Wales deal, high cost efforts to attract economic development come with their own significant risks. Those of us who can remember the Kate Carnell days remember several expensive economic development deals which were supposed to bring jobs and investment to Canberra but which, instead, basically delivered benefits to a corporation rather than the ACT community.
Looking at that background, when the Greens and I were considering whether or not to support this bill we were looking for two things: first, that the new mechanism created must not undermine the broader protections in place for government land sales. In particular, it must be limited to this particular land sale. Second, that, as the University of New South Wales will be given this land at much less than market value, the ACT government needs to have substantial protections to avoid a situation where it gives up a lot of money and land value but ends up with no or minimal community benefit.
The bill has received the Greens’ support because we believe it meets both those tests. Firstly, it is restricted to this particular deal with the University of New South Wales and, secondly, there are protections in the bill to make sure the university does not have free rein to sell the land for profit without investing in Canberra. I trust that the government—be it a Coe or Barr government or whatever governments we have in the future—will use the mechanisms within this bill, because they will only work if the government is diligent and uses them.
I will now talk about the deal itself. I am pleased that there will not to be more and more residential further down Constitution Avenue. While residential is obviously incredibly important, a city needs more than just places to live. Reid CIT has been a great use of that space and it is unfortunate that there has not been a community-based process to determine the best future for one of the most valuable sites in our city.
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