11 October 2024

Liberals' plan for land sales windfall doesn't stack up, says Barr

| Ian Bushnell
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Andrew Barr says there is not enough time in one term for such a large amount of land to be serviced and approved. Photo: Ian Bushnell.

The Canberra Liberals will struggle to meet its accelerated land release target in its first term if they win government and would fall short of its billion-dollar revenue windfall to shore up the budget, according to Chief Minister Andrew Barr.

Mr Barr told Region that he questioned whether demand would be enough to justify such a compressed land release program and the capacity to deliver it.

The Liberals say the ACT Government’s bottom line will be buoyed by a $1.3 billion windfall from accelerated land sales of 6050 blocks to the 2028-29 financial year.

Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee says this will bring in $900 million in her first term.

But Mr Barr says the winding back of overseas immigration, which would be even more severe if Peter Dutton became Prime Minister, would mean a slower rate of population growth and impact demand.

READ MORE ACT finances: The brown stuff’s going to hit the whirly thing, the only question is when

He said there were also questions about being able to release that amount of land in an approved serviced form in that period of time.

“Unless they are proposing to sell it without sewerage, water, electricity, roads, they’re just not going to be able to achieve the practical timeline, let alone the sales,” he said.

“Who is doing the estate development? Who’s going to do the civil works? Who’s connecting the water, the sewerage, the electricity? Who’s building the roads? And how is that going to be done in the time frame that they’ve talked about?

“Then it’s all got to go through planning approval and the estate development. That work doesn’t just happen. It’s got to be done by someone.

“And they’ve not really answered how that’s going to occur, allegedly at the same time as all these other major infrastructure projects are being delivered.”

Mr Barr said it was folly to base long-term taxation and spending decisions on one-off asset sales.

“You only sell the land once,” he said.

Mr Barr has already announced a speeding up of land release to boost housing with the Indicative Land Release Program for the next five years showing the government expects to release enough land for 21,422 dwellings, with 5107 in this financial year.

If returned to government, Mr Barr flagged an overhaul of directorates to accompany the declaration of housing supply as a major project to help meet Labor’s goal of 30,000 new homes by 2030.

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Mr Barr has resisted calls for a super housing portfolio, but there will be administrative changes to better align planning and transport, while city services, environment, parks and land management could be brought together.

He acknowledged frustrations with the approvals process, particularly from developers, but said that now the planning reforms were bedded down, resources were being freed up.

“One of the benefits of an administrative change that will more closely align planning and transport will be to address some of those sorts of issues,” he said.

“The emphasis is on delivery and I will make some administrative changes to enhance that.”

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Incidental Tourist9:55 am 14 Oct 24

We see Barr opening mouth but we hear voice of Rattenburry.
Anybody who takes a drive around major capital cities can see large swats of green field land releases at a much lower price than in ACT and much further from CBD including neighbouring NSW regions.
The problem for Barr is playing to Greens narrative who drove that insane 80%/20% infill agenda and the endless thrust for land-related revenue gauging caused by utopia mega-projects and financial mismanagement.

devils_advocate10:25 am 14 Oct 24

There is actually plenty of underutilised and suitably zoned land in the ACT, near existing centres, with old and small buildings that are past their economic life

Problem is that the potential redevelopment has been strangled by excess regulatory burden and taxes (the regulations themselves are fine, the time it takes for bureaucrats to issue final decisions, even on fully rule-compliant developments, adds 100’s of thousands in regulatory costs)

Barr wishes to continue to gorge Canberran’s for land and housing, having directed his monopoly developer SLA to jack up prices well beyond inflation, such that profit margins from land sales are now double what they were back in 2010, making Woolies and Coles look benevolent in comparison. Add to this that the Barr government has overseen 14 years of delays and counting to the release of land in Kenny and it’s pretty plain to see that Barr and his government bear significant responsibility for the rental, housing affordability crisis and indebtedness impacting households across in the ACT.

The Liberals flooded ACT Treasury with their costing requests after voting started on Tuesday! There are 30 requests sitting there from the Liberals awaiting outcomes with only two released six days out from the election!

The Greens have only submitted 13 requests with all still in progress.

Labor has put in 100 costing requests since September.

The Canberra Liberals and the Greens have no respect for ACT voters!

@Jack D.
OMG, Jack D! Looks like I’ll have to make another non-sensical rebuttal of your biased electioneeering.

I wondered how you were privy to such detailed information about the costings. So I googled ‘how many ACT election costings is treasury currently assessing’ and this page was among the results:
https://www.treasury.act.gov.au/electioncostings
… so it’s transparent and the information is freely available to the public.

A quick look at the requests for Labor and Liberal parties, showed that you are correct in your stating “Labor has put in 100 costing requests since September”. However, the page shows there are 99 Liberal requests (not 30), all lodged, as you say, on or after Tuesday, 8 October 2024.

I didn’t check the Greens – because who really cares!

However, after that, you put on your ‘Labor spin doctoring hat’ and go to work.

While Labor has lodged a number of requests “since September”, the vast majority (74 out of 100!) were lodged on or after Tuesday, 8 October 2024. Which makes for a fairer comparison between the two major parties.

Now perhaps you will emphasise that, to date,your comment “Liberals awaiting outcomes with only two released, but that would be (not suprisingly) partisan nit picking. For, of the 84 Labor costing requests lodged since 1 October, ACT Treasury has costed 9, as you say “six days out from the election!”

So, it would seem that, according to your “respect for ACT voters” yardstick, using your own reference material, Labor has also come up short.

There’s a word to describe your post, Jack D, and the word is not “truthful”.

There were 30 Liberal requests sitting on the ACT Treasury site when I posted my comment yesterday and 100 Labor.

I stand by my comments!

@Jack D.
Irrespective of how many Liberal requests were on the site yesterday, you freely admit that there were 100 Labor requests yesterday. And as I demonstrated, 74 of those 100 Labor requests, were lodged on or after Tuesday, 8 October 2024.

Perhaps you need to convince ACT Treasury that they got the lodgement date, of those 74 Labor requests, wrong? I think not!

So, I’ll accept that you stand by your hypocrisy and your proven false narrative, Jack D!

The Liberals have always been big on lies and short on achieving anything. No wonder they don’t get voted in.

Since there’s no housing shortage with heaps of empty Government housing and buildings don’t breach environmental laws committing mass extinction of critically endangered flora and fauna

The AMA is there specifically to look after doctors and their financial interests. In the ACT, the AMA has constantly hindered the government’s efforts in supporting health services aimed at supporting ALL of those in our community.

The AMA refuses to support the nurse walk-in centres and has done their best to hamper any efforts to make it easier for people to access bulk billing services. This is despite them having the highest tax free threshold in the country and other government initiatives offered to them them to provide these services!

Barr is just saying the budget is in worse shape than reported so far!

Thanks for the confidence

It’s probably a lie but not nearly as bad as Labor always telling us they will deliver a balanced budget then always producing big deficits.

HiddenDragon9:15 pm 12 Oct 24

“Mr Barr said it was folly to base long-term taxation and spending decisions on one-off asset sales.”

That is a truly extraordinary statement from a Chief Minister and Treasurer who delivered the 2024-25 ACT Budget, a document which estimates that the ACT’s net debt will increase by $3.6bn between 2024-25 and 2027-28 – in spite of estimated land revenues of $2.0bn in the same period.

In light of those grim figures, the comments attributed to Barr in this article amount to an admission that the ACT is on a fiscally unsustainable trajectory and that revenue gouged from eked out sales of grossly over-priced land is part of a desperate strategy to delay the day of reckoning.

Within that, there is also an admission that the ACT government’s addictive reliance on land revenues is such that a growing ACT simply cannot afford to offer lower and middle income Canberra families the housing choices they want – so increasing numbers will continue to look elsewhere.

devils_advocate8:08 pm 12 Oct 24

Sure the timeline would be unachievable – for Barr.

If only there was some large scale but useless “white elephant” infrastructure project underway that could be cancelled, that might free up some productive capacity.

Amanda Kiley6:03 pm 12 Oct 24

So Andrew Barr you have had 23 years to deliver … well everything, and, when you don’t deliver you have the audacity to criticise other options

Bright Spark3:32 pm 12 Oct 24

How can we be expected to take any financial advice from a Chief Minister (& Treasurer!) who has overseen the ACT debt sky-rocket, mass blow-outs in the cost of light rail, the waste of 10’s of $Millions more ratepayer/voter funds for the scrapped HR system, and the waste of Millions more of our hard earned $$$ on the CIT clutterup. To name just a few!

Where’s the story on Mr Barr never once meeting his land release, housing builds and public housing goals in over a decade.

It’s been housing failures year in year out, but Mr Barr remains too scared to move his housing minister and Labor factional opponent to a different portfolio.

Balance needed1:09 pm 12 Oct 24

If, despite Mr Bushnell’s very best efforts, the Liberals somehow manage to win government, he’s going to have a 4 year field day ripping into them.

The Liberals’ more of everything for less platform, with details to come later, apparently doesn’t stack up at all. But you know it’s their turn or something because tantrums…

The ALPs more extensive promises and 20+ years of actual recorded failures make them totally unfit for government.

But you know, we shouldn’t consider anyone else because it’s risky or something.

All they have to do is cut back on the billions of dollars wasted by labor and the greens on vanity projects and virtue signalling. We can then have more of things people actually want and need, and have a heap left over to start paying down the multi generational level of debt your mates andy and the rat have foisted upon the ACT.

Maybe you can explain how it is that the ACT has the most expensive health system in the country, ranked last by the AMA and paying doctors the least? There are fundamental disconnects like this all through the ACT government. With ACT residents being the most highly taxed in the country and comparatively getting some of the worst services, I think it’s past time the public demanded more of everything for less than what we’re paying now.

That’s an opinion not a fact you should learn to recognise the difference Chewy.

Sorry Ken Besides the fact you’re wrong about everything I have no interest in engaging with supporters of murderous facist dictators.

Garfield, The AMA is a doctor’s union and not a particularly representative one. I do wish people would stop touting them as if they were a peak medical body. They’re a lobby group for a subset of doctors.

The list of failures is a factual record of non delivery by the current government, an objectively worsening economic position over the last decade and a more expensive list of election promises being proposed by the current government with little to no detail as to how they will be funded or delivered in the proposed timelines.

The only opinion is my belief that those failures make them unfit for government and that a renewal of our “forever government” would improve outcomes longer term. I suppose others might be happy with continued mediocrity, I’d prefer to see government improve.

But of course, something something……right wing extremists everywhere amirite?

No that’s still just your opinion champ.

Seano now putting forward a position that policy and election promises politicians make don’t actually count to their recorded performance if they fail to deliver on them when in power.

Weird hill to die on Buddy.

Gregg Heldon10:22 am 12 Oct 24

The Barr/Bushnell love in, in full effect.
He doesn’t afford Lee the same right of reply on any Labor “promise”.
Even if the Liberals only achieve half of the numbers they’re promise, it’s still better that most years Labor has achieved in land releases and sales. It should, hopefully, make housing more affordable, especially for first time buyers.

I believe you Andrew. You’ve never made a promise you didn’t deliver.

What absolute rubbish from Barr, of course he is going to say it is unachievable because he knows he has failed to release the land. Also how can he say it is not possible and then Claim he can deliver 30,000 homes by 2030.

Bushnell writing another puff piece for the ALP, what a surprise.

Although Andrew Barr is probably right around the Liberals plans, he definitely has a lot of experience in not delivering on election promises, so is well placed to comment.

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