Page 2886 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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The way they handled this and the way they helped create this crisis has been quite shameful. They squeezed land supply. Nowhere else in Australia does a government have so much ability to influence these things. We have a unique situation here in the territory with the control of territory land by the territory government. The government have a unique opportunity, and what they have done for many years serves to make homeownership harder.
The government need to get the fundamentals right. They are land release and competition in the market to ensure that the people who do this best are able to go out there and compete so that we do not have monopolies, we do not just have a couple of major players and we do not just have the Land Development Agency and their joint venture partners. We need to have genuine competition so that those who want to provide affordable product are competing against other providers of affordable product and we see downward pressure on prices. This is what we have argued for for so long. Occasionally this government will accede to that idea and then claim credit when, lo and behold, the private sector actually delivers for them.
Much of the cost of building is due to the planning system. We know that this is the other fundamental that this government has so consistently failed to get right, and it is so important. The cost of building in the territory is still very high by national standards. One of the reasons for that, apart from the lack of competition or the stifling of competition by this government, is the planning system and some of the delays we have seen in it.
Whilst some improvements have been made through legislative change, we continue to see the cultural legacy within ACTPLA. I think we now need to put on the record what industry is saying about the current planning minister. It was not so long ago that the industry was just so happy that Simon Corbell was not the planning minister because of those flawed polices that he put in place in relation to the Land Development Agency and the attitude that he brought to this issue. They thought Andrew Barr would have a more enlightened approach to economics and to industry, and for a while there was a lot of positivity towards the new planning minister. But the feedback we are now getting is that indeed the planning minister is simply not interested. He is just not interested in planning.
Mr Hanson: Not enough photo opportunities?
MR SESELJA: Well, apparently the photo ops are all in education. He simply is not interested. This is the consistent feedback we are hearing, that this is a planning minister who simply allows bureaucrats and, to some extent, people in his office, although not particularly even in his office, to actually run the show. What we elect governments to do and what we have ministers for is to actually give guidance and policy direction and show leadership. When you have got a planning minister who is so obviously disinterested in his portfolio, it is difficult. It is very difficult for industry, and this is what we are hearing consistently now about the current planning minister.
That does not help to get the kinds of structural and cultural changes we need to get better outcomes in terms of building and building costs, better outcomes that actually
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