Page 1932 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 August 2007
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• secondly, the process will assist in the provision of adequate land and housing options at the lower end of the market. This “demand matching” approach need not affect general housing prices, community’s returns on its land assets or the efficient and sustainable use of greenfields land.
The government has failed in its objectives. If the objective of the LDA was to make housing and land more affordable in the territory, it has failed. The ACT now has some of the most expensive land in the country, and in large part that is because the government has simply failed to get enough of it out there. That has happened under the LDA. This has been a misguided project from the start.
Canberrans, essentially Canberra home buyers, and first home buyers in particular, have been forced to prop up the LDA’s bottom line. There are no two ways about it. The Chief Minister, in a moment of honesty, acknowledged this without quite saying it. He acknowledged that they have been fleecing first home buyers in order to prop up the bottom line. He said, “Well, I would rather give up some profits in order to keep housing more affordable.” That is not what he has been doing for the past few years. What he has been doing for the past few years is fleecing first home buyers. They have been forced to pay exorbitant amounts not just for their land but also in rates and charges in order to prop up the bottom line of the LDA and of this government. It is an unreasonable cost burden that has been placed on a particular group in our society, particularly first home buyers. First home buyers have had to bear the brunt of this flawed policy.
The idea of moving back, as we did under the former planning minister, to a government monopoly land developer is just extraordinary. This is why the minister cannot quite keep a straight face on this, because he must know that this was a bad idea. To go down the path of a public sector monopoly for land development was always flawed, and flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, monopolies generally should be avoided where possible.
Mr Barr: Economists?
MR SESELJA: Most economists would probably acknowledge that, whether they be public or private. There are very few areas where we should maintain monopolies. Land development is one area where we should not be having monopolies. Essentially, over the past few years, that is what we have had under the LDA. We have had a government monopoly. People might be able to put up with it if they were seeing good outcomes, but they are not. Housing has become less and less affordable since the LDA came into being.
We have a number of conceptual problems with it. One of the fundamental problems is that it is not their money. That is just one of the fundamental differences between a government monopoly land developer and a private land developer. When it is your money, you act differently. That is simply human nature. That is the reality of it. We have seen it with some of the excesses in spending from the Land Development Agency—the ridiculous spending of $200,000 on a site office, which industry would spend $30,000 to $40,000 on. If you are going to spend five to six times the industry standard on things like that, you are just going to go through the agency. There is
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