Bills

Planning, Development and Infrastructure (Use of Vacant Land) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (11:20): Can I congratulate the whip, the member for Elizabeth, on this motion. I fully support the fact that you have done a 180 and looked at this seriously. I think we really need to look at this. There are a couple of sayings or expressions that I want this parliament, the politicians in this place, to recognise. One is that people say that every day we sit is every day we do damage. Let me tell you, if you bring in legislation like this it absolutely validates that comment. That is not to suggest that we do not do some good either.

The other point I would make about this amendment is that this is like the canary in the coal mine. Why is it like the canary in the coal mine? When this sort of stuff comes up through one of the chambers and is given serious consideration and then passes, and is seen as an answer, it actually tells us that this place and who sit in it are clueless as to why we have a problem and what we are trying to address here: we have a shortage of housing, we have homeless people and we have a lack of development. Not only that, we do not look at why.

I sit on the ERDC. I respected a former Labor member there, Minister John Rau, when he helped to condense the planning act from 23,000 or 24,000 pages to 7,000 pages, just to simplify building in this state. It is working to a large degree. There are still some issues with it—local governments still struggle with it to a degree—but it is a condensation of red tape and makes it easier to build houses. One of the things I do when I sit on the ERDC is to approve everything that wants to build a new home and as many homes as possible that would be tolerated by the community.

When you move to these sorts of answers and you look at why these answers are being sought, we know that we now have 700,000 migrants coming into Australia rather than the around 400,000 migrants five years ago. We know that these migrants come unskilled. We know that these migrants do not have a home and that they need a home.

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr McBRIDE: That is true. They need a home and this is creating a logjam. It is not being recognised. Not only do they need a home but they do not know how to build one if you want them to go and build. We know that this country has not had any productivity gains in 10 years. We know that the workers who have been building these houses—the cost of a house in the last five or 10 years has gone from $150,000 or $200,000 to $600,000, which is out of the reach of first-time homebuyers and people who are trying to start out in life.

To come back to the earlier speakers and about what vacant land meant to the Australian dream: 50, 60 and 70 years ago, in the 1950s and 1960s, recently married couples would buy their vacant block of land for $500 to $1,000, and they would sit on that vacant land and that would be their dream home in 10 or 20 years when they could afford to build the home—and then they would be able to build their home later. These sorts of clauses delete and devalue and remove the validation of being able to buy your small vacant lot and then say, 'When we are ready, we are going to build our dream home for our family, and we will go there and live there.' This sort of legislation deletes and removes that type of possibility, but that is how we got to where we are today—and it is like it did not even exist.

I have to say—very quickly, because I know that in another five minutes I have a meeting with the Minister for Health—that I absolutely applaud the government for recognising this. I am disappointed with whoever it is in the upper house—it does not matter whether the opposition voted against it, which they did, and it does not matter whether the Labor government sought to see that this might be an answer to back a Greens piece of legislation. What we have to be responsible for is that we all belong to the one institution, making rules and regulations about homes and housing, and when you come up with ideas like this it tells me that there are not too many ideas out there to solve this problem.

When you start looking at this seriously, you see that you do need productivity, you need to remove red tape and you need to build as many houses on vacant land as possible. I am a big supporter of that process through the ERDC and in backing up the Chair—sorry, I cannot remember the name. It is a good committee in the sense that it is there to actually make sure that the community concerns are heard but that we also are addressing the issues—or trying to address the issues to whatever that extent is—to make sure that houses are built in numbers that absolutely meet the objective of the housing demand that is out there.

The only thing I have to say that I have a little concern about—but I am happy to say that the numbers are there—is that we love to see this greening of Adelaide, we love to see trees being protected, we like to see space and what they call the eastern suburbs being translated out to the western suburbs, the north and the south. That will have a cost and will bear some impediment on all the housing that could be a potential in Greater Adelaide or the condensed city of Adelaide.

However, it is out of my control. I have to say I am more about removing trees and building houses than worrying about some shade. That is my perspective of it, and that is fine. I know that there are green suburbs and leafy suburbs and I know there are other suburbs that love a tree. However, we do not want homeless people: we want more homes, we want more houses and this is why we end up with legislation like this. I welcome the whip, the member for Elizabeth, and his motion to remove it. Congratulations to the government on waking up to this and thank you.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta) (11:25): I oppose the Planning, Development and Infrastructure (Use of Vacant Land) Amendment Bill. The Liberal Party opposes this vacant land bill. The Liberal Party has opposed this bill since it was proposed by the Greens. This is an area where we differ from the government. The government supported this bill in the Legislative Council. The Labor Party supported it. They clarified that on the record in the Legislative Council, and I will quote from the Labor Party's spokesperson on this bill when this was dealt with in the upper house of the parliament. She said:

The government supports the intent of the bill and is open to discussing sensible reforms that see vital land that is being banked made available for housing.

Consequently, the Liberal Party, through our shadow minister Michelle Lensink, articulated very clearly our staunch opposition to this bill. We are opposed to this bill because it is a betrayal of property rights. We are opposed to this bill because those people, through their work, their effort, have put money aside. Many of my constituents have said to me and Scott Kennedy, the Liberal candidate for Morialta, that they consider it their superannuation potentially. Many of them are migrants to this country who have worked hard, who expected that when they entered into the contract to purchase their land those property rights, that contract right, that basic fundamental principle in a democratic society, would be understood, that that was their land and they were able to apply it as appropriate.

For this bill to come forward from the Greens, supported by the government in the Legislative Council, that would see their property rights abrogated, that would see the government capable of imposing a compulsory lease over their land as a government priority with no compensation to the landowner, with not even the opinion of the landowner taken into consideration, is utterly despicable. It is an extraordinary state of affairs.

Sir, as you know, this is my last year in the parliament. I am working really hard not to use hyperbolic rhetoric in my speeches. I consider myself to be a peacemaker—I try to get along with everybody—but this bill is an utter failure in the duties of those Labor members who considered this bill in caucus and said, obviously, to their Legislative Council colleagues, 'Let's support this bill. We are comfortable. We support the intent of this bill.' So the Liberal Party in the lower house will oppose the motion proposed by the Labor Party today.

I am encouraged at the proposition that potentially the entire house might oppose this motion. The Liberal Party has been talking to people in the community a lot about this issue in the last few weeks, certainly in Morialta. I know Scott Kennedy tells me that when he is out on the doors he hears every second day from somebody who is very concerned about this bill. He certainly has said to me that he would oppose this if it ever comes up, if it ever rears its ugly head again in the future.

In the meantime, I am pleased to vote against this. I am pleased to vote against this bill and I hope—it is my sincere hope—that every member of this house will oppose this bill and send a clear message to the Greens, and a clear message to anyone in the Labor Party who thought this was a good idea to the point they encouraged their caucus to support this in the Legislative Council, that it may never see its head again. But what the voters in Morialta and the voters across South Australia can be assured of is that Scott Kennedy in the Liberal Party in Morialta, and the Liberal Party more generally, will never support this legislation that so abrogates people's property rights and hopefully we can knock this on the head right now.

The SPEAKER: Thank you for your contribution, member for Morialta, and your calmness and your cool approach, as you vowed you would take, to this debate.

Second reading negatived.