Page 2487 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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MRS DUNNE: It is not funny.
Mr Barr interjecting—
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Mr Barr, desist, please, so that I can hear Mrs Dunne in silence.
MRS DUNNE: This is an appalling travesty. What do we actually have here today? Ms Hunter has the audacity to get up here and run through this. I have got 10 minutes. She does not even know how the house procedures work. I have got 10 minutes. I have got to go through this. She could not even say that amendment 1 does this and amendment 2 does that, because after a while she got sick of it. She said that the next amendment does blah da blah and the next amendment does blah da blah.
She started off really well by saying that amendment 1—I love this—reduces the risk of impropriety. Amendment 1 reduces the risk of impropriety, or so she says. But as Mr Seselja said, let us move to amendment no 14. It is a doozy. This is where it all falls down. We have section after section of discretion for either the Treasurer or, presumably, the planning minister in this. “The Treasurer can do this.” “The Treasurer may determine an amount to be remitted for a lease variation charge.” “The Minister may determine a requirement for energy efficiency under subsection (1).” “The commissioner must remit variations in certain zones; those certain zones are determined by the minister.” All of the policy substance is put together in this massive power grab by the ACT government, a massive money grab by the ACT government, with a whole lot of nanny state things thrown in for good measure.
What we have here is a range of things—as Mr Seselja said, about 13 different determinations and variations which will affect planning and the levying of tax on property in the ACT. It is without doubt lacking in transparency. It brings regulations—and, by the minister’s own admission, things that probably should be in regulations—into the act.
Part of the reason that we are doing this is that even the Greens, when they are tied by barbed wire to this government, do not quite trust them enough. They do not quite trust them enough, so they want to bring the regs into the act. These are written like regulations, they look like regulations, and they act like regulations. It shows that it is poor policy. It is badly drafted, it is badly put together, and the people of the ACT will pay the price—and not just with Katy Gallagher’s and Meredith Hunter’s hands in the pockets of homeowners who are going to be trying to buy houses and units.
The cost of units will certainly go up; we have demonstrated that. There is nothing in the minister’s bland assurances that “We have done the research and we do not believe that this will have any impact on house prices.” That is just poppycock. If you put a tax of $50,000 on a unit, it will drive up the cost of the unit by $50,000. No developer in this town is going to absorb that tax because suddenly they are feeling magnanimous.
Mr Barr interjecting—
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