Page 2008 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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exemptions for the sons and daughters of millionaires, but he is not prepared to actually assist battling young Canberra families into homeownership. He has held out that opportunity through his flawed stamp duty proposal of homeownership, but he will not allow the dream to those Canberra families on $50,000 a year. We could not have that, could we, Mr Seselja? He will do everything in his power, including rewriting history, to ensure that it cannot happen. He will take quotes from 2004 and allow people to think they are from four years later. He will stick half the FOI documents he has down the shredder and then tell journalists that he does not have them.
Let us look at some of the Liberal Party’s other desperate claims. House values, they claim, under land rent would depreciate over time. Not according to Treasury analysis they will not. I have said this before, and repeatedly. The Treasury’s detailed analysis of houses that were built and sold in the past seven years shows that, on average, house values increased by 10 per cent a year, whereas land values grew by 16 per cent. In dollar terms, because the starting house price value was typically larger than the starting land value, more than half the average increase in value was actually due to house price growth. In not a single case in that sample by Treasury did the value of the house fall. That is more Liberal spin, more misrepresentation, more determination to undo the scheme. They are facts the Liberals do not want to know; facts for which they put their fingers in their ears to avoid having to hear; facts they consign to the shredder in fear that the journalists will get them.
It is further suggested that it was only in February this year that the government allowed people to rescind their contracts for land rent. That is another misrepresentation—more truth into the old Seselja office shredder. There is currently no penalty or charge at all for lessees of single land rent blocks who decide to discontinue the hold on their block or choose to return land to the ACT government. Those holding a single block who have not exchanged contracts have always been free to walk away from the scheme.
It was claimed that people currently holding blocks of land will miss out on the first homeowners boost. That is not true. Those people are free to enter into a traditional crown lease on the block that they are holding under land rent or another block of land in order to access the homeowners boost. Of course, in those circumstances, they would have to pay the full market value of the block. There is nothing stopping them from doing that, if they can afford it. Those people have not been disadvantaged by the land rent scheme, because it is not an obligation. Nobody is forced to pursue land rent. It is an opportunity, an opportunity which we are determined to provide to those people who struggle to gain entry into the housing market.
There is, indeed, cause for serious condemnation today. The individual to be condemned today is the Leader of the Opposition, as I have proposed in my amendment. The Leader of the Opposition has seriously and serially misled the people of Canberra in relation to the land rent scheme. He has deliberately abused the philosophy underpinning freedom of information—that is, that the full facts be made available to people. Has he revealed those full facts? No, he has not. When a journalist asked him whether he had revealed the full facts, he said yes. He was asked whether there was other information in the papers and he said no. He has snipped and
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