Page 1779 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 May 2010
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But there are things that can be done. For a long time we have been calling for land release that is genuinely responsive. What we often see, and I suspect that this is what we have seen in this budget, is that the government pick out round numbers. They do not do analysis. They know inherently that there needs to be a little bit more. They know they need to be seen to be responding; so they come up with a round number. We have seen it in the last couple of years. They say, “We are going to urgently release 1,000 blocks.” Often that urgent release of 1,000 blocks takes a long time actually to get to market, but it is this round number. What analysis has been done to know what demand is projected to be?
We have argued for a long time that we need to get in front of this situation through infrastructure planning but also through better forward planning in ACTPLA, through actually having resources particularly targeted towards ensuring that there is a serious pipeline of supply and that we reduce the gap between when a land release is announced, when it is initially put on the market to when we actually see houses being built on it. There is a number of things you can do on that.
As I said, infrastructure planning is critical. When you speak to groups like the HIA they will tell you that. They will tell you that it is indeed some of the infrastructure delays that prevent the houses from being built. We are seeing now Molonglo is finally being marketed. This has been years coming. We expected it would come several years ago and it is now finally being marketed. I have seen the ads on the tellie. We are very pleased to see some blocks going in Molonglo. But I understand there is still going to be, again, a gap between when people can build. There will be a significant gap. There are things that can be done to narrow that gap. There is better planning that can be done.
We heard today at the budget breakfast about looking at things like contestability of supplying electricity. Issues like that actually delay things. It actually adds to costs because we have generators on site for builders and the like but it also delays things when we have to wait for some time for these basic services to be hooked up.
There are a number of other things that need to be done. I refer to genuine competition in the market which this government has been so keen to stop. Simon Corbell, on behalf of ACT Labor, really helped to cause this housing affordability crisis. He helped cause this housing affordability crisis, as demonstrated in this graph. It shows that massive and sudden jump and the gap open up between the growth in wages and the growth in house prices. Not only did he help cause that on behalf of ACT Labor but we also saw the way that the LDA was established and the desire to see a monopoly there. Later on there was a reluctant acceptance of the fact that something different had to be done and then we saw some englobo release added to that.
We say there should be more of that. We say there should be more of those types of releases but not just large parcels for one developer. What we would want to see is mixing up the way we release land, mixing up the types of releases we have: some off the shelf, some going in parcels of 100 and 200 and indeed up to sometimes 500 and 1,000 where one developer does most of it. That lack of competition, which has been actively encouraged by this government, has made things worse as well.
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