Wednesday, 30 October 2024

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:30): (1233) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop. The Suburban Rail Loop is an unfunded project at absolute best. The government know this and increasingly the public across the state know and understand this as well. The government is scrambling to find every dollar it can by tax or levy or charge to fund this project. One of these levies is the value capture tax, in regard to which the minister said in a response to Parliament that those who benefit most from the SRL help contribute to its cost. This has always been understood to mean that there will be a specific SRL tax for SRL precinct developers. The announcement by the government that it will relax planning laws around 50 new activity centres obviously explodes this model. Why would a business or a developer want to invest in a precinct where there is a specific additional value capture tax rather than in an area where there is not an SRL but there is an SRL-scale uplift? Why build a 20-storey tower in Box Hill South with this tax when you could do the exact same thing at greater profit in an area where there is no such tax, such as Blackburn, or Footscray for that matter?

When it says that those who will benefit from the Suburban Rail Loop will also bear the burden of paying for this costly, costly train line, does that extend to the entire state or only to people in the precincts of the SRL? The action I seek from the minister is for him to clarify whether any value capture model underpinning the Suburban Rail Loop’s fundamental business model is viable given that you now can clearly develop towers outside the precinct zones without a Suburban Rail Loop value capture tax.