Page 2348 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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established? It will not be anything he will have done, because for the past five or six years all we have seen is one opportunity after another squandered.
Housing affordability is important. Clearly the Federal Government will get involved now because the eight Labor states and territories have, through their ineptitude, fooled the housing market against the poor and the young. Here the Stanhope Government has had three goes at dealing with the issue, three reports. What action has been taken after the first two reports? Absolutely nothing. The crisis has deepened; the crisis has got worse. I see we are joined by the former planning minister who, from 2001 to 2006, oversaw planning and land releases in this territory; the tax collector, the grim reaper of gouging. We now see the government has a third report. The question is: will it have any effect? It will not have any effect until the LDA is taken out of this equation.
It is interesting that yesterday the Chief Minister was quoting an REI report that said the ACT had the best housing affordability of any jurisdiction in Australia. If that were the case, why has the government had Treasury officials put together its housing affordability strategy? The Chief Minister is lauding this independent body. The REI has said we have the most affordable housing of any jurisdiction. On that basis we probably do not need a strategy. But we have a strategy. We have this big, thick document that was announced with a big hoo-ha on the day that Mr Corbell gazumped his leader and got out there, got out front and rained on Jon’s parade, because he knew what was coming, that planning and LDA were going, so he thought, “I will get out there and I will be the hero of the proletariat. I will get out there and talk to the workers.”
If just some short months later we do not have a crisis in the ACT, why do we need this report? So who do you believe? There is certainly little reason to believe the Chief Minister. Anecdotal evidence tells me—in fact, it tells everyone who is on a small income, a low income or who has teenage kids or kids in their early 20s or young marrieds—that there is a problem out there. It is extremely difficult for people seeking to buy a home to be able to do so.
The answer of the deferred duty proposal is ill-founded. I have spoken of that before. What they are going to do is put it off for up to five years and then pay it in a lump sum. If a young married couple or a young couple set up home and buy a house together, there is probably a fair chance that five years later they are going to go from a two-income family to a one-income family. There is a good chance they are going to have a child. Five years into their relationship and paying off their home, they are going to need a lump sum to pay off the deferred duty at an exorbitant rate of interest. It is something like 14 per cent. The Chief Minister had that wrong on a couple of occasions. He said it will be a bank rate, then it will be this rate and then it will be back this way. The rate changes daily on the whim of the Chief Minister.
Five years into their relationship, five years into paying off their house, there is a better than average chance that, through the ill-founded policies of this government over the past seven years, parents will not be able to stay at home. They will be forced back into the workforce earlier, forcing their kids into childcare instead of getting the nurturing they need at home so they can pay the Chief Minister’s lump sum. He claims it will save them $2,000. That is based on a false premise. That is based on the
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