Page 2089 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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How is it that not one member of the Labor Party stands up here and calls their own party to account? How is it that all of these social justice warriors will not stand up for the 27,000 people in Canberra living below the poverty line so much because of the decisions of this Labor government?
Think about land tax. It is very easy for the Labor Party to concoct this argument that it is all about rich investors. The reality is, unfortunately, that investing in Canberra does not really stack up the way it used to. Maybe this is Andrew Barr’s objective: maybe he does want to drive out all of the investors from the ACT. Maybe he does not want to have people doing business in the ACT. Maybe he does not want to have private sector jobs.
As a direct consequence of not having residential property investors, the ACT does not have rental properties. The few that you do have will go up. That is exactly what we are seeing. That is why Anglicare says that there is not one single property in the ACT that is affordable. That is as a result of 18 years of Labor, but particularly as a result of Andrew Barr as Chief Minister and Treasurer.
The other serious issue with regard to the cost of living in the ACT and particularly the cost of housing is land supply. This government has deliberately driven up the cost of land so that it is out of reach for so many Canberrans. This suits their narrative for several reasons: (1), they do not like the idea of families living on a block of land; and, (2), by restricting the supply of land, they then increase the cost of that land. It therefore gives them justification to increase the value of every other block in Canberra and, in turn, hike up the rates.
That is exactly what has happened. In recent years we have seen an increase to the ratings factors; that is, the multiplier. What they have just discovered is that they can have a double whammy effect if they not only increase the multiplier but also increase the value. If you increase the base and you increase the multiplier, you get an exponential increase. That is exactly what is happening right now.
They are doing it right across the ACT. I am afraid that many people who buy a block of land in Throsby, Casey, Taylor, Moncrieff, Coombs, Whitlam or Denman do not realise that the top dollar that they are paying for their block then becomes their unimproved value for ratings purposes.
Not only are they paying top dollar up front but they will pay top dollar every single year from then on. It is not just a capital hit; it is an ongoing income hit as well. When someone pays $480,000 for a 500 square metre block of land in Throsby, they pay stamp duty, they have paid top dollar for the land, and then they pay extortionate rates forever.
The tragedy of all this is that it will be very hard to fix the land crisis that this government has caused because the last thing anybody wants is to devalue the price of land in the ACT. So many families have worked hard, they have saved up huge amounts of money to put together a deposit, so they can buy a block of land. We need to respect that purchase and we need to respect their equity.
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