Page 1432 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 6 May 2008
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commitment to charging first home buyers upwards of $15,000 for stamp duty. Chief Minister, why are you continuing to impose massive levels of stamp duty on first home buyers?
MR STANHOPE: I thank the Leader of the Opposition for the question. Indeed, housing affordability is a very significant initiative and the ACT government, I am pleased to say, through our strategic, almost universally accepted and now being copied housing affordability action plan and strategy, is beginning to deliver significant benefits.
Mrs Burke interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR STANHOPE: We get some indication of just how wedded the opposition is to its much-feted stamp duty initiative—its one and only policy, actually, in its 3½ years in opposition—and of course that is why we see it being rolled out sort of ad nauseam over these last couple of weeks, of course, also through the device of an un-means-tested first home buyers grant.
It is quite remarkable in the context of a genuine attempt at dealing with issues of affordability. Affordability affects most particularly those—
Opposition members interjecting—
MR STANHOPE: in the lower quintiles of earning or income. To release as your signature policy, the policy that you propose to get you out of the single-digit recognition category, is that you will use—
Opposition members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Chief Minister, come back to the subject matter of the question.
Opposition members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: And members of the opposition cease interjecting!
MR STANHOPE: We have as the signature policy an un-means-tested reduction in stamp duty for first home buyers. So one of Mr Seselja’s millionaire mates—
MR SPEAKER: Come back to the subject matter of the question.
MR STANHOPE: I am explaining the nature of the Liberal Party’s signature policy.
MR SPEAKER: It was not about—
MR STANHOPE: If you are a first home buyer—
Mr Smyth interjecting—
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