Page 1976 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 August 2007
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because of the way the price of land has gone up, and the way it has driven up the cost of housing.”
I gave this example the other day. To the best of my recollection—and the figures are not precise—at the last land sale before the 2001 election, which was for a block of land in Ngunnawal, the raw land price was $26,000 per block for standard residential blocks—about 500 square metres. That was the raw land component. That is what the developer paid for. After they were developed, they sold for under $70,000. The last blocks of land that were sold and serviced before the change of government sold in Gungahlin for under $70,000.
With respect to the first blocks of land sold before the establishment of the Land Development Agency but under the new scheme that Mr Corbell was trying to put in place at Yerrabi stage 1, they sold at auction for not less than $90,000. There was no block there for less than $90,000. Over the time that I was the shadow minister for planning, I regularly attended auctions and ballots that were conducted by the Land Development Agency and its predecessor, the Gungahlin Development Authority, during the time when it merged from one to the other, and over that time I saw the price of blocks go up to $128,000, and then they went up to $148,000.
By Harrison stage 1, there were no blocks available for under $140,000. Since then, the price has just gone up and up, until quite recently, without any concern on the part of the Stanhope government. I give credit to the minister this morning, because he has become a little concerned about the carpetbagging nature of his colleagues. It was obvious that the Chief Minister was feeling uncomfortable about being a carpetbagger as well, because he took over control of the Land Development Agency, away from the planning minister. We had a move away from exclusive development by the Land Development Agency back to much more developer involvement in this, which resulted in what could only be described as a spac attack from the then planning minister and, as a result, he is no longer the planning minister.
There was a clear change in government policy away from the failed proposals put in place by the previous planning minister. As a result, we now have some changes. For instance, there are developments at MacGregor that may see some brakes being put on the cost of land—and the cost of land is an increasing component in the value of housing. We have seen this across Australia, and we see it here regularly. The cost of building a house has not actually gone up all that much but the cost of buying the land on which that house is situated has gone up extraordinarily.
With the establishment of the Land Development Agency—I suppose I used to say it jokingly, and Mr Corbell used to take exception to it—it was like a return to the good old days of DURD, Kep Enderby and Gough Whitlam. We wanted to have a workers’ paradise where everything was made great by the servicing of land. What we actually had in Mr Corbell’s workers’ paradise was workers being priced out of the market. They no longer had the capacity to buy land; the average tradesman, his wife and children do not have the prospect of owning a comfortable, modest bungalow in the suburbs anymore because it has now been priced beyond their reach, mainly through the intervention of Simon Corbell, the previous Minister for Planning, and of the Land Development Agency. The only thing that will change that is to have a complete departure from the current Land Development Agency model, and something that will
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