Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to note a number of developments in a long-running electorate issue of mine involving property tax, land taxes and property development issues. This week the New South Wales state government attempted to bring in a series of reforms to the planning system to attempt to streamline the system. Whenever I hear about ‘streamlining of planning’ I get alarmed and I know that residents in my electorate get alarmed, because under the former New South Wales Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, there was an attempt to impose green zones across properties all over my electorate, which would have massively affected the property rights and the ability of a person to sell their land within my electorate

This is an ongoing issue because the body that has been proposed by the state government has the serious potential for conflict of interest for any councillors or council staff members who are appointed as representatives. This has been noted by the New South Wales Local Government Association. The department has so far failed to provide any guidelines or codes of conduct but has sought local representatives, who would, of course, be the smaller component of the numbers on this committee. I understand that the state government is very interested in having the numbers on these committees so that decisions made by them to streamline planning arrangements would mean that they would simply be rubberstamped by the state government, and local representatives would be ineffectual. It is yet another attempt to override the rights of a local council. It is an attempt, in my view, to again threaten many of the property and land rights of other ordinary citizens within our state.

Indeed, it comes in a week when we see the long-term impact of land taxes starting to be understood. Land tax is another issue which has impacted upon my electorate. I record that there are 4,908 people within the Baulkham Hills shire paying land tax. There is also good evidence that says that this is not just a tax on the wealthy but it also affects people in large numbers in areas such as Bankstown or Fairfield, which are the Labor Party’s heartland. This tax over time is having an insidious effect on the amount of capital that is available for property investment, leading to a sustained downturn and depression in the property industry in New South Wales. It is one of the reasons we are having a redistribution, as hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the state of New South Wales for Queensland for better economic circumstances.

This morning I want to record that this new development of a new planning body will severely affect constituents in my electorate and is something that I oppose. It is something that, without guidelines or without a code of conduct and with the state government having the numbers, could severely threatened many property owners once again, as the state government in New South Wales has tried to do in the past.