Page 2763 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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explode them. He can just settle down and talk about policies, but do not get paranoid about people plotting against you. Quite frankly, we are not plotting against you because we are not going to waste that amount of time.
Mr Coe: What are you doing now?
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Coe wants to know what I am doing now. Well, plotting is not one of them. It is very difficult to plot when you are talking directly to people.
On the issue of substance, these people across the chamber have missed what housing affordability is all about, what the strategy is all about. It is something that these guys seem to have missed all this time.
Mr Coe: What is it about? What have you achieved?
MR HARGREAVES: Rabbiting on like a very thin Joe Hockey is not going to cut it with me, I am afraid. I am just going to ignore you. Madam Deputy Speaker, if only Mr Coe would just be quiet for a couple of seconds and be a good little boy, he might actually learn one or two things. It would be nice. I have listened to him in silence and I ask that he do the same.
The issue the Chief Minister has championed around housing affordability for a very long time is to increase and enhance the opportunities for people to achieve homeownership—the ultimate goal, the ultimate success for people. What we are talking about is opportunity, the provision of opportunity, not obligation. These folks over here confuse opportunity with obligation.
Let me just run through a few things that this Chief Minister has championed over the years that I have been associated with him. There is the increased land release—the negotiations with the developers to make sure that we can deliver properties for under $300,000 per property. We know that at west Macgregor some of those properties sold at $290,000. That is a success story. Nobody is obliged to go and buy them, but it is an opportunity for them.
There is the actual increase in land supply itself, considerably greater numbers of blocks out there in the marketplace to reduce the cost of land, which, in turn, will flow on to an opportunity for people to buy properties and realise their dream. We have our sale to tenants program within public and community housing that we are enhancing and trying to get on with.
We have the shared equity scheme, which is almost with us at the moment, which gives people an opportunity. If this opportunity actually presents itself the way we believe it will, it will go right through the private marketplace and then give people a greater opportunity to own their own home.
Then we have got land rent. The CPS credit union is on board. Hello! These people have been naysayers for so long, yet here we have a significant financial institution saying that this is a visionary approach to homeownership.
Members interjecting—
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