Page 2884 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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already there. Everybody is in. It is the same thing with the land rent scheme—it is now there—and in the next couple of months the shared equity scheme will be there.
It was prudent to make sure that we did have the support and the encouragement of the financial institution that is going to support this. Remember: we are not going to oblige anybody to go and use the land rent scheme. If people do not like it, they do not have to pick it up. But it is an opportunity for some people to get into the marketplace that would otherwise never have got there. And I think we ought to be receiving encouragement from those opposite to do just that, to give people an opportunity to own their own home when previously they did not have any hope at all.
This is a good motion and I urge the Assembly to support Ms Burch’s motion.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.26): We will be supporting this motion. I think it is a very important issue. Ms Burch was talking about why she actually brought it forward, and I suppose the fact that she spent five minutes of her 15 and has not hung around for the actual debate perhaps suggests she was told to by the Chief Minister’s office. I think that is probably the rationale for her bringing this motion.
I know the Labor Party were very keen not to debate this and the motion following today. They were very keen to talk about other things. Even though the Treasurer was not going to be here, they wanted to talk about the budget, rather than talk about things like housing affordability and land rent. You can see why, and we will get into that in the next motion in relation to some of the devil being in the detail for Mr Stanhope, as always.
I wanted to talk particularly at this stage about Ms Burch’s motion. Whilst it is a short motion and it was a short speech, it is actually quite broad because it is looking at the importance of policies to help households on modest incomes and Canberrans who have historically been locked out of the housing market.
There are a number of things you need to do to get this right, and it is worth looking at what needs to be done and what the government has done. One of the key issues in making housing more affordable is land release. No-one is more culpable for pushing up land prices for first-homebuyers and young families in Canberra than this Labor government. Under, it must be said, the previous planning minister, Simon Corbell, we saw one of the most disgraceful, deliberate efforts to actually make housing less affordable in the territory. Simon Corbell and this government—approved by this government, so all members of this cabinet need to share responsibility for this—deliberately slowed down land release. For what purpose we are not sure but they deliberately slowed it down, and the effect of that was to dramatically push up prices and to push homeownership out of the reach of many young families.
That is a matter of fact, that is a matter of record and it is a matter of great shame. Whenever we discuss housing affordability it needs to be remembered that the reason it first got out of control and out of reach was as a result of deliberate actions by this government. They slowed land release significantly. They cut competition in the
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