Page 3165 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 9 November 2021
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you and your 2.5 kids and your modest wage increase and modest property increases are supposed to get you through. It is fanciful that that is the world that we live in—fanciful!
Mr Parton: You were selling them. You were selling them, buddy. You were selling the stolen land.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Pettersson): Mr Parton! You will stop the interjections.
MR DAVIS: I am really glad that you bring that up, Mr Parton, because I have constantly—
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mr Davis, you will make your comments through the chair.
MR DAVIS: Yes, Mr Assistant Speaker. Through you, I appreciate Mr Parton’s interjection and I will take it up, because it is fair to say that I have often found myself a bit confounded about the perceived conflict between what I did for a living for 12 years before I got elected to this place and the policies I now advocate for.
Need I remind members of this house that there are few things I think I can speak on from the unique perspective of experience and understanding perhaps a fraction more than Mr Parton—that would be 12 years of listing, managing, marketing and negotiating the sale of residential property in this city. What I can tell the Canberra Liberals is that the city is changing and the Canberra Liberals have not kept up.
I am really challenged by this continuing narrative that every single Canberran wants to do away with our beautiful green spaces so they can have a nice big house on a nice big block, subtly undermining the choice that many Canberrans make to live in attached dwellings, apartments or townhouses. It is really galling to see how nasty and insidious that debate risks becoming, when we know that the development of apartments and townhouses and more affordable properties in the ACT have in large part been one of the few ways young people in this city—that is, people under 40—have been able to crack into the housing market.
It would be completely impossible for people of my generation—lest they get a nice, big loan from the Bank of Mum and Dad—to break into the real estate market if the real estate market in the ACT was influenced by the policy direction put forward today by the Canberra Liberals. Absolutely impossible, which I find so frustrating.
The Canberra Liberals cannot really figure out whether they are coming or going on the question of housing affordability because, not unlike a game of pin the tail on the donkey, we have tried desperately over the past few years to try and figure out exactly what the problem is with the housing affordability crisis in the city on the condition, like with so many other areas of public policy, that we remain completely, purposefully and pathologically blind to the policy settings the federal government are in charge of.
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