Page 1975 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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What does the Chief Minister say to the bloke who works full time at Woolies? His wife works part time on the reception desk at a dental surgery, and they have three kids. He is embarrassed that he can only afford a two-bedroom apartment. He just hangs his head in shame. He is crushed by it every day. What does the Chief Minister say to the young couple who moved to Googong but who now have to put their young kids in child care because grandma and grandpa’s place in Florey is too far away to drop them off and make it to work on time? People say, “It’s a First World problem.” It is a problem that impacts this family enormously and it impacts the very fabric of their family. They would have loved to have purchased in Canberra. They looked and they tried but it was not possible; it just was not possible.
I had a conversation with a real estate figure in this city earlier in the week who suggested that it is likely that many hundreds of rental properties have been sold in our jurisdiction during this COVID crisis. I said to him, “Surely, a percentage of those properties would have been purchased by other investors.” He confidently suggested to me that none of them—not a single one—would have been purchased by an investor. He said, “There are nil investors in the market.”
That is a problem in other markets, but it is a worse problem here because of the various policies that have been introduced, from changes to the tax system to changes in residential tenancies regulation. Many of these changes have been marketed by Labor and the Greens as being extremely helpful to renters. I am sure these changes will be trumpeted to renters extremely loudly in the lead-up to the election. In the end, as was always forecast by the Canberra Liberals, these changes have not been beneficial to renters at all. We have all seen the average rent prices. We have all seen where they have gone.
When it comes to the direct marketing to quite a number of those renters, I suggest that Labor and the Greens might struggle to ascertain their actual addresses because a large number of them are couch surfing, many of them have moved back home with mum and dad, many have left the territory and, in a number of cases, they are sleeping in their cars. When it comes to distributing those leaflets, walk around, find the cars with the windows fogged up and, in the dead of night, gently put the flyer that says “We’re looking after renters” under the windscreen wiper.
Long-term land release policy is one of the big killers in this space. It leads us to ask: does the Chief Minister actually care about everyday Canberrans? As the opposition, we sit back, look at what the government has put on the table and say, “Who actually stands to gain? Who stands to gain from this housing policy? Who stands to gain from the fact that almost all new housing supply is in the form of apartments?” The government gains, because of the land sale, the new apartment tax and other charges, but who else gains?
When I speak to the voters of Tuggeranong about these issues, as I do most days, they are not backward in coming forward on this. Out there in the suburbs, the belief is that the biggest beneficiaries of this policy position are developers. Developers of high-rise apartments have the most to gain.
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