Page 644 - Week 02 - Thursday, 18 February 2016
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I have read out this letter before but it is worth reading out again:
Good afternoon, Brendan.
I would like to raise the issue of the large increase in ACT rates this year and the incompetent economic management by the ACT Labour Party. I have just received my new rates bill of $1849.59 for our house in Macarthur. The rates for last year were $1,598.28 and so the new rates bill is an increase of 12.25% when wage growth is on average less than 3% at present. For the previous year our rates increased by 9.36%. So for the last 2 years, our rates have increased by 21.6% which is just ridiculous and unsustainable, especially for people who have retired from the workforce. When the light rail project has to be paid for, rates obviously have to substantially increase again and socialist ideals can only go so far before the whole ACT economy is in big trouble.
That is the problem. Idealistic approaches to things often do not meet the reality test out in the market, particularly when people on fixed incomes or low incomes do not have that capacity.
We only have to look at Mr Barr’s failed lease variation charge. The latest quarterly reports were tabled last week, and I am sure the Treasurer knows that I always read them with great interest. The lease variation charge for the first half of this year was meant to raise $8.145 million. Unfortunately, it came up $5.131 million short, raising just over $3 million. This is a tax that has destroyed affordability in Civic. That is what it has done. It has destroyed it. Nobody is building. The two building projects underway at the moment are a consequence of developers changing their leases before the lease variation charge came in. Certainly neither of them, I am told, would have gone ahead had they tried to do it under the lease variation charge. The old CAGA centre, which is now the Manhattan apartments, used to give the government, I think, about $65,000 a year in rates. The new Manhattan gives something closer to $700,000.
So it is about making sure you get the taxes right, and this Treasurer should admit he got the lease variation charge wrong. He should follow the Liberal’s path and at least have the moratorium that we have promised for four years on Civic and the town centres so that we can get Civic and the town centres functioning properly, contributing to the wellbeing of the people of the ACT by being great places to visit but also delivering economic viability by delivering the sorts of returns you would expect from those areas, which the government is not getting at the moment because of Mr Barr’s approach. It is like the failed Wayne Swan mining tax. That is all it is—all promise. It was going to deliver much but has delivered absolutely underwhelmingly in each and every year. Even the target at $16 million for this year, which is way below the high $20 million target that was set, on this basis will not be reached.
We have got a Treasurer who sits over there, who will not admit he got it wrong and who will not admit that if he really wants the density that he wants—the government says they want 50 per cent of development in brownfield sites—the only way to get that achievement is to get rid of this dreadful tax. Indeed, I think I saw an article yesterday in which the head of the economic development directorate, Mr Dawes, said
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