Page 1780 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 June 2016
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they tax them more. And this is to somehow give parity so that all dwellings are paying, it would seem, the same amount of rates. But all dwellings do not have the same amount of amenity and do not have the same number of features. Units are entirely different to your standard quarter-acre block. Again, this is a treasurer who does not get how the average family is living. This is a treasurer who does not get the average family’s budget. And you can see that he casts his budgets accordingly.
Let us go to the lease variation charge. It was going to fund improved urban amenity. It was going to make a motza for the government. It is rapidly looking more and more like Andrew Barr’s, the Chief Minister’s, mining tax. And lease variation charge this year was meant to raise $16 million. Instead it has raised $5 million. That is the estimate for the year. This is a tax that constantly fails. At this stage, I think after the original estimates, it was to be close to up to $30 million a year.
What it has done is stifle growth, particularly in Civic and certainly in the town centres. Only two buildings, the Manhattan and the old Canberra Club project, were all approved under the old regime. And there is study after study that shows quite clearly that what they have done is kill the golden goose, particularly in the town centres. I think the average lease variation collection in the past five years is about $1¼ million in Civic and the town centres because people are not building there because they cannot afford it. They cannot take the product to market because the banks will not lend because the banks know it is unaffordable. And that is a problem created by this Treasurer who is so out of touch with the reality of life in the ACT.
Lease variation magically will jump from the $5 million expected this year to $17,744,000 next year, an increase of 251 per cent, and then blithely in the outyears it is $18 million, $19 million, $20 million. What the Treasurer should do is admit that this is a failed tax, that it is flawed. What it is doing is actually increasing the size of the city. If you want to buy a block of land or get a dwelling you have got to go further and further afield because you cannot afford to purchase in the inner city. And what he is doing is locking the younger generations out of home ownership. He is forcing them to go further and further afield and often away from where they particularly want to be. Yet again this is a treasurer that has failed.
What the Treasurer must do is cease inappropriately increasing the cost burdens on the community, and that is what this motion calls for. We all understand that some things must go up. We all know that, if you have a three-year rolling average on the land value, it generates the rates assessment notice. We get that. But to put another $4½ million and then $7 million, $7 million and $7 million in the outyears is, I think, not what people expected.
The rates take just continues to grow. It is 10 per cent in 2017-18; it is nine per cent in 2018-19 and eight per cent in 2019-20. And that is just the residential. The commercials go up a whopping 10 per cent and go up something like eight per cent in each of the outyears, the total take. Some of that, of course, is increased numbers of dwellings or offices to be taxed. But you can see that it continues.
The Treasurer thinks that splitting it into commercial and residential rates will ease the pain but people know that a 4½ per cent increase is way beyond the pale. It is
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