Page 405 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 2019
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As a government we talk to the community, as we have done with Molonglo, as we have done with west Belconnen and as we have done with Gungahlin. There is a range of different things that happen to supply land for residential development. To facilitate the development of land for residential purposes, due diligence processes mean that it can take many years to undertake further planning and environmental studies to satisfy both the commonwealth government and the ACT planning authority; and, of course, there is engaging with the Canberra community.
Once the work is completed, the government can start to look at developing the area of land, which, again, has a significant lead-in time to being sale-ready. As members will know, there is a detailed process through the planning authority to get a suburb approved, as is appropriate, and then sell the blocks to buyers. At that stage, when it is sold, it is sold in a number of different ways to the buyer, which now includes an option for buyers to go in and get it over the counter.
As reflected in the ACT housing strategy released in October last year, I remind members that the first objective is to model and publish housing supply and demand projections—(Time expired.)
MS CODY: Minister, what are the different ways that Canberrans can choose to purchase land in the ACT?
MS BERRY: There are a number of ways. At the moment there is a lot of land in the pipeline to be sold in a range of ways to prospective buyers from both private sellers and the ACT government. It is important to remind members that it is not only the government that hold the levers of land sales. At this time there are some 20,460 greenfield dwelling sites in the planners’ pipeline, over 9,300 dwelling sites in the developers’ pipeline and more than 6,000 dwellings in the builders’ pipeline.
Sometimes, depending on the location or development type, the government decides to develop through a joint venture arrangement as we have done in west Belconnen and in the past with Crace and Forde. Sometimes it is sold as englobo, a whole area or suburb to a developer, as is the case in Denman Prospect and Lawson, and sometimes the government develops the land for release to the community through a range of sale methods such as auction or tender.
In terms of pipelines, private developers will make decisions, usually based on market conditions, on what they might release or construct at any time. But I also want to remind members that that land is also available over the counter. Currently there are 396 single residential blocks available for sale over the counter from the Suburban Land Agency. These blocks are available in Taylor, Throsby, Coombs and Wright.
An objective of the four-year indicative land release program is to make sure that enough residential commercial, mixed use, industrial and community land is released to the market to cater for the city’s growth. It is a simplistic assessment to say that raising prices is all we do in our land release. Through all of the work that has been done with the community to develop the housing strategy over the past decade, we have delivered all these initiatives through previous affordable housing strategies as well as new ones in the current strategy.
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