PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENT AMENDMENT (GROWTH AREAS INFRASTRUCTURE CONTRIBUTION) BILL 2011
17-June-2011
Mr BURGESS (Hastings) -- It is a great pleasure to speak on the Planning and Environment Amendment (Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution) Bill 2011.
I say it is a great pleasure because I saw the suffering in my local community when the previous government conducted investigations into how to expand the urban growth boundary and then said to people, 'When we include your property, we are going to ask you to pay $95 000 per hectare'. Members need to look at the history of a variety of governments at all levels over the last few decades to work out just how offensive that sort of statement is.
For decades governments have told people throughout the nation that they would not be able to afford to support them in their retirement because there was such an ageing population. In good faith, members of the community invested in their own superannuation and in property so that they could afford to pay for themselves rather than imposing on the rest of the community. That is all well and good until a government such as the former Brumby government comes along. The infamous former Minister for Planning, now the member for Essendon, said, 'I'm sorry, we have changed the rules'.
In fact he did not seem to say he was sorry but simply said, 'We have changed the rules.
The government has wasted close to $400 billion over the last 10 years, so we do not have the money to put in infrastructure. Instead of you looking after yourselves, you are again going to have to look after this government'. That is the travesty that the previous government imposed on the state of Victoria, and it should be remembered for decades for that. It did this in every area, and this is just another one of the areas the Baillieu government is having to clean up.
When the government introduced the concept of a growth areas infrastructure contribution (GAIC) it was to be 100 per cent up-front and imposed on the people who owned the land. That flies in the face of what the member for Essendon, the ex-planning minister, said the basis of it was not 20 minutes ago in this place. He said the coalition was trying to look after the developers, while Labor was trying to pay for infrastructure. What Labor actually did was impose the GAIC on landowners; we are imposing it on developers. However, the opposition is somehow suggesting that the opposite has taken place.
An honourable member -- They haven't read the bill.
Mr BURGESS -- The interjection was that members of the opposition clearly have not read the bill, and I think that is probably the case.
I will give one example of what was being imposed on people that relates particularly to my area. Owning 200 hectares of land is not unusual in places that used to be remote country areas where families have been on the land for decades. Such landowners are often very cash poor but land rich. When you say anything about people being land rich, the socialist character of members of the former Labor government comes to the surface. They need to get their hands on that money, and they will find any way they can to do that -- and the GAIC was just another way to do it.
One example that is based on the experience of a constituent in my electorate -- the actual situation was not quite as severe as this -- is that of a little old lady whose husband has passed away in the last few years and who is sitting on a substantial amount of land. For 200 hectares of land she would receive a bill for $19 million at the point of sale or at the first trigger point. That bill would have been directly imposed on the person who owned the property, not on the developer, as per the situation the opposition is suggesting it was trying to bring about. That is absolute rubbish. The former government was running out of money, it wanted to win the next election and it needed money, and that was the way it went about it. That was a disgrace. This bill is trying to tidy up the mess that it made. If there had been landowners who owned 1100 hectares, which again in those sorts of areas -- --
Mr Nardella interjected.
The ACTING SPEAKER (Mrs Victoria) -- Order! The member for Melton will have his opportunity.
Mr BURGESS -- In that sort of area 1100 hectares is not unusual, and again there could have been people who were particularly cash strapped. They were going to get a bill -- --
Mr Nardella interjected.
Mr BURGESS -- We can hear the interjection from the member for Melton -- this envy politics. He is saying, 'Eleven hundred hectares; they really need to be paying a lot of money'. It was going to be a bill for $104 million. The member for Melton might have been able to afford that; the owners of the land in those areas could not afford it. But did the previous government give any thought to that? No way.
I was certainly present at a number of public meetings where the angst of the community came across. I tabled petitions on their behalf, and a group called Taxed Out was formed because its members had had enough of the previous government. They had fought and fought to try to get the previous government to understand their plight and to understand the difficulty that they were being put through. Did the previous government listen? No.
The only ground that was given at all was when the previous government's bill was defeated in the upper house, and it had to come and talk about it, and then we managed to get it to agree to a 70 per cent imposition -- and that was kicking and screaming.
What we have done with this bill is deliver on another Baillieu government commitment of moving the imposition of this particular bill to 100 per cent at the point of compliance, which as I said earlier is 100 per cent at the point of development and on the developer, not on the landowner, who when they bought that land had no idea that they were going to get a bill of this magnitude. And really, there was no reason for them to have suspected that they would -- until there was a Brumby government.
The ageing population, in good faith, has tried to produce its own level of superannuation, but there was really no way of understanding that a government such as the Brumby government was going to come along with the levels of waste and mismanagement that this house has heard about over and over again in the last six months. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars that have been wasted. The previous government believed wholeheartedly that it had to find it from somewhere, and why would you not, if you come from that sort of belief, go to people who own land? That is particularly what those opposite do.
One of the important points to come out of this debate was heard when the member for Essendon -- the previous Minister for Planning, who had carriage of the original GAIC bill -- was arguing that what the previous government was trying to do was put a bill on developers. But when we argued with the government when we were in opposition and said, 'Let's put the time when the developers are going to pay at the point of compliance, at the point of development', clearly the government thought, 'Hang on a minute; we're not going to get enough money in our pockets right now. We're not going to have enough money to fund our promises into the next election. That's not good enough. We need to get that money now'. That is why it held out.
That is why it insisted that the bill be imposed on the current owners, because that was the only way it was going to get money up front -- which is what we know was the absolute reason for the introduction of the GAIC in the first place.
We have moved the imposition of that contribution to the point of compliance, to the point where the developer is about to develop, which has to be justice because that is the point in time when there will be money made available to be able to satisfy such a debt, and it really does produce some form of justice for the people who are currently sitting on land who have had no input into this and who have had an unjust tax attempted to be imposed on them by the previous government. This government is now turning to the point where we can have some justice and where the tax will be put at the point where it should be applied. I commend the bill to the house.