25 June 2011

Zed weeps for the Property Council

| johnboy
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24 hours after the event Zed Seselja put out an outraged media release on the passage of change of use charges for developers wanting to throw up units on single residence blocks:

“Day one of an ‘accountable’ Gallagher Labor government and she’s already thrown openness out the window,” Zed said.

“What we saw tonight is the ramming through of significant amendments at the last minute and then an attempt from both the Chief Minister and the Greens Leader Meredith Hunter to push through without debate on each change.

The Greens provided 17 pages of amendments at lunch time today, then wanted to pass them all with the help of Labor in one go at 7.30pm this evening.

“This one piece of legislation will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to the ACT tax coffers, at the expense of homebuyers and renters and Ms Gallagher and Ms Hunter don’t want to debate the substance of this massive tax.

There I was thinking this had been debated ad nauseam for months.

But one media release wasn’t enough, so Zed had another go, also published a day later than its dateline.

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Was that an open window she threw openness out of? I weep for the English language, Zed.

Mr Lubberlubber3:15 pm 27 Jun 11

54-11 said :

I noticed the PCA’s vuvuzela, Catherine Carter, having yet another whinge in the CT today. It’s about time the parasitic developers in this city realised that sucking on the public tit, by redeveloping land that was originally zoned for single-use, and making super-profits by building ugly units, is not sustainable.

Some of that super-profit must come back to the true land-owners, which are the ACT citizens.

And, to make it worse, far too many of those ugly units are shoddily built, and the super-rich parasitic developers wriggle and squirm their way out of any responsibility for their incompetence.

A really basic economics lesson. If you have proper competition in a market, super profits cannot be made. There seems to be a lot of developers in town – probably too much for them to arrange some kind of cartel that allows them all to make a super profit.

A second lesson, even easier to understand. Land (i.e. existing homes they are knocking down) is a cost to a developer. Just like any cost to a business, they can only pay so much for it. Any increase in charges that the government introduces means that they have taken a bigger slice of that cost pie and left less to the homeowner.

The people who have been making money out of the old system were the people who were selling their houses to developers when the charges were lower. Many people have done really well out of selling their inner-North homes to developers – it didn’t really matter to them what was built afterwards.

I feel real sorry for the people who held out against the developers who are now surrounded by these units and townhouses and can no longer sell to the developers unless they take a price hit.

What on earth is a ‘super’ profit? Presumably you are able to give a cogent explanation of what is a ‘normal’ profit. BTW, as we can only lease our land, your proposition that ACT citizens are ‘the true land-owners’ doesn’t stand up.

I noticed the PCA’s vuvuzela, Catherine Carter, having yet another whinge in the CT today. It’s about time the parasitic developers in this city realised that sucking on the public tit, by redeveloping land that was originally zoned for single-use, and making super-profits by building ugly units, is not sustainable.

Some of that super-profit must come back to the true land-owners, which are the ACT citizens.

And, to make it worse, far too many of those ugly units are shoddily built, and the super-rich parasitic developers wriggle and squirm their way out of any responsibility for their incompetence.

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