Page 4306 - Week 13 - Thursday, 4 December 2014
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saying to them, “Join the scheme. We will come and buy your property.” If you do not, there is this looming threat of compulsory acquisition. The government will come in and take that property. They will only get compensation based on the value of the property, noting that it has Mr Fluffy insulation.
Home owners feel that they are being compelled to join the scheme. They know that if they do join the scheme, what happens is that the government will give them a fair price, and that is a good thing. But what will happen is that the government will then get their block and they will subdivide it or they will unit title it so that there is an uplift. The value of that block goes up on average 25 per cent. This is for 88 per cent of the blocks involved.
Those home owners who have already faced massive financial hardship then come back to try and rebuy their block and it has gone up by 25 per cent. For the vast majority of Mr Fluffy home owners, that is not affordable. So the consequence of joining the government’s scheme is they are driven from their homes, they are driven from their blocks and they are driven from their communities. That, Madam Speaker, is not fair.
Many home owners have long associations with their communities. We heard many stories. They have been in their homes in some cases for decades. There is one couple that we have spoken to who have been in their home for 64 years. The inability to return to those homes is a tragedy for those people. Ultimately, it comes down to whether you view your home, your land, as simply a financial asset or whether it is a home. For all of these people, it is their home. We know the stories. We have seen them in the media. Anyone listening to the inquiry would know this and many of us—I am sure all of us—have had conversations with people in these circumstances.
I certainly refer the members of the Assembly to the committee’s recommendations—recommendation 19, recommendation 20 and recommendation 21—that make this point and say that Mr Fluffy home owners should be allowed to retain the ownership of their block, that they should have assistance from the government in demolishing, but it should be on fair terms and they should not be driven from their land, which is what they will be compelled to do under the government’s current scheme.
We know that not everyone will take this option up. The experience from the Canberra bushfires was that about a third of people did want to stay on their land. Many people moved on. Although there will be people at the moment who are Mr Fluffy home owners who are thinking they want to stay, many of those will move on. But we accept that there is a cost to this, Madam Speaker. We accept that there is a cost.
That cost will be in the order of $30 million to $50 million, depending on how many home owners and on which blocks they are on. But it is affordable. It is affordable, because we have been told that the entire cost of this project, the net cost, is somewhere between $300 million and $400 million. The government is not sure. It depends on how many people take up the offer and so on. So the government’s appropriation bill is only accurate to a factor of $100 million. That is the margin of error. What we are calling on today is well within the margin of error. It is well within that margin of error and it is affordable. It is fair and it is flexible.
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