Page 1795 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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over time because you have not had the opportunity to exercise the maximum number of uses or maximize the number of uses in a way that does not spark the intervention of an inquiry about the change of uses. Over time, this will create two classes of leases in the same way as we have with residential leases—the old style leases that give us rights to two residences on our property and the new leases that do not. There will be a skewing of the market in favour of older leases and a devaluing of newer leases, which will have fewer uses available to them under the system. This shows a fairly basic misunderstanding or a wilful ignoring of the leasehold system and how it interacts with the land use system.
If you want to have a discussion about the leasehold system, as Mr Seselja said, by all means have a discussion. Open a discussion about the leasehold system, but this one clause—and the consequential amendments that hang off it—will, over time, fundamentally change the leasehold system in the ACT for the worse. It will skew the economics of land in the ACT in favour of older leases, because the newer leases will have fewer uses attributed to them and they will be of a lower value as a result of that.
In putting this forward, the government fails to understand that when people acquire a lease, and they acquire a suite of possible uses under it, they pay for that right. People will not be prepared to pay for a lease that may have six, eight or 10 possible uses if they cannot make the decision. For example, one might start off with a newsagency on that site, but, over time, the newsagency is no longer viable and somebody might decide that that shop would be better used as, say, a hairdresser. Because it requires substantial plumbing works, it would require a DA, and then it would automatically trigger a process whereby that use would be subject to investigation by the territory as to whether that was appropriate. Then a whole bunch of planners are making economic decisions about whether it is desirable to have a hairdresser in this place. That decision rightly rests with the person who wants to open the business, not with the planners.
There are problems with the leasehold system, but the government is making all of those problems worse. Constrained lease purpose clauses have constantly been a problem that arises in the territory. Over the past few years they have been improved. There has been less constraint, but what we are doing here is going back to the bad old days of more constraint, where bureaucrats end up making the decision about what is a legitimate business, not taking into account that we have a land use policy that will, for the most part, set out where particular sorts of businesses or particular sorts of operations can be undertaken. We all have commercial land and we have industrial land. The descriptions of land use policy is where you make those decisions about whether it is an appropriate place to have a hairdresser or a nuclear power station or a funeral parlour or a dog pound. Those decisions are made at the land use level, and then specific leases have a variety of uses.
To have this halfway house where you may acquire a right that you can never exercise because the planners, in the wisdom of their review, may decide that it is not appropriate to have a hairdresser where once there was a newsagent, means people will not be prepared to pay for a lease because they will have no certainty, as Mr Seselja said. We are taking the certainty out of the system. Decisions that are rightfully business decisions will become decisions made by bureaucrats.
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