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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3826 ..

MS TUCKER (11.11), in reply: I thank members for their comments, although I think they are pretty disappointing. I will go through the comments, starting with the Treasurer. I do not want to misrepresent him, but one of the first points he made was that he thought this was bad legislation because it confused a number of objectives—decent planning and affordable housing. I do not see that as a contradiction or a confusion of objectives; I see those two things as absolutely integrated and consistent with each other.

The ACT’s capacity to provide affordable housing depends upon a thriving economy and a high level of growth. That is the argument that often comes in any attempt to bring social and environmental considerations into the economy. Obviously the key point that I would have to stress again in this place is that there is no way that you can assert in this place that a thriving economy will actually produce social or environmental outcomes. The fact is that if we do not structure into that economic system some way of dealing with those social and environmental objectives they just do not happen. The myth of the trickle-down effect is seen to be a myth and recognised as such, whether it is local, state, national or international government, and that is why we have the concept of triple bottom-line reporting; that is why gross domestic product is now discounted as any really meaningful analysis of the wellbeing of a community.

The assumption of course, though, that Mr Quinlan and other people have made in this place—that this is going to have a seriously detrimental impact on our economy and that people are going to run away—is based on a really basic misunderstanding of what our legislation does. I am surprised that everyone in this place, including the Democrats and Mrs Cross, has said that this is a blunt object. That is basically the sense that was coming from what a lot of people said.

In fact, the reality of our legislation is that it is not a blunt object; it is actually a very flexible piece of legislation that allows a number of ways to meet this social responsibility of the private sector in partnership with government. The flexibility that exists within our legislation is in terms of the forms of the contribution that can be made, whether it can be in the form of public housing, community housing, a donation—as occurs in New South Wales—to affordable housing, affordable rent and, of course the capacity for government to actually work with the industry to provide issues such as some kind of reduction of betterment, change of use, land tax, whatever. What this is about is actually putting up some kind of practical measure to meet the objectives that I have been hearing about in this place since 1995 that no government has done anything practical to achieve. I think it is really a gross misrepresentation of our legislation that has been made by every speaker so far in this debate.

It is not, as Mr Quinlan said, a naive confusion of basic objectives; it is an understanding of the need to actually integrate social, environmental and economic objectives and to do that in a way that actually takes into account the reality for the development industry, which is exactly what we have done in this legislation. We have acknowledged the need for a conversation; we have acknowledged the potential and the need for there to be an acknowledgement of the situation of developers through the various mechanisms that I just outlined.

I was just looking back at the debate that we had on the land authority. Some of the things that were said, I think, are also ironic. I note that, in my speech on the Land

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