Page 4385 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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Having a genuine land bank, looking at our taxation system, looking at competition in the market, streamlining our planning system—these are the solutions that the Labor Party and the Greens will not support. Instead, their policy is to lock up whole suburbs for the golden sun moth and to impose great big new taxes on units. Those policies hurt. Not to mention that when this government spends so much money on wasteful expenditure, and therefore passes the cost of that on to Canberra families, they have to pay more and more in their rates. Talk to those families in Tuggeranong who have seen their rates go up by, in some cases, well over 100 per cent since the Labor Party came to office. What has been done for those families? Are they just a cash cow? Is the family on $50,000 just a cash cow when it comes to more rates? Is a family on $80,000 just a cash cow when it comes to more rates? We do not believe they are.
All of your policies have to have regard to this. This Labor-Greens alliance has been the worst thing that has happened to affordability in the ACT. It has been the worst thing that has happened to families facing financial pressures because they keep placing more and more financial pressures on these families.
So we say that, yes, we should debate this as a matter of public importance, but people should bring some credibility to the table, they should bring some honesty to the table and they should admit that their policies are actually making the situation worse. They are making it harder for families. We are going to continue to fight for those families. We are going to fight for their cost of living, for their quality of life and for their aspirations to own their own home. (Time expired.)
MR CORBELL: (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (5.32): Just briefly, I think it is important to put on the record some myth busting in relation to the continual misrepresentation of the facts that we get from Mr Seselja on a couple of issues.
What I find particularly egregious is that Mr Seselja is the shadow minister for the environment, and he has stood up in this place and said he is of the generation that does not need to be convinced about the importance of protecting the environment. Yet he is the same man who continues to misrepresent the position in relation to Throsby.
In relation to Throsby, he should know, as the shadow minister for the environment, that there is a thing called national environment protection law, which was put in place by the former Howard government. It is called the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conversation Act. The EPBC requires that before development occurs in areas where there are nationally threatened or endangered species there be an approval under that act by the commonwealth minister. That is the process the government is working through currently in relation to Throsby. The government believes that development can occur at Throsby and will occur at Throsby with an EPBC approval.
But what is most concerning is that we have a shadow minister for the environment who seems to feign all knowledge or understanding of how national environment protection law operates and the obligation that is on every developer in this country,
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