From the Gold Coast to Cairns, local elections have delivered office to people whose platform was aimed at controlling (read "preventing") further development in their communities.
Not only does this deliver a bitter blow to those who want to buy affordable houses but it threatens the state's economy.
Modern Queensland owes much to the tourist and retirement industry developments, which from the 1980s plugged a gap created in the state's economy by relatively subdued activity in resources and agriculture.
As a result the state has transformed from a backwater to a cosmopolitan must-visit place that became a magnet for people in the southern states. All this was made possible by low-cost housing. Land price increases in recent years threaten that.
In real terms the cost of building houses and apartments in Queensland has not changed -- it is just as cheap as it was in the 1970s. With increased levels of incomes, housing should be more affordable but the opposite is true. This is because land prices in real terms have risen threefold and now comprise a larger proportion of the house and land package than the house itself.
The impact of this on house affordability has been severe. In June 2007, average loan repayments were $432.70 a week. This meant 37 per cent of median weekly income was going in housing loan repayments (and interest rates have made it worse since then).
Such a level of repayment indicates major financial pressures. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute defines housing stress as households with housing costs at least 30 per cent of gross household income.
The Sunshine Coast typifies what is taking place in regional Queensland. Home prices have escalated markedly and a recently released study of housing affordability by Demographia placed the region as the seventh least affordable area of the 227 markets analysed worldwide.
As a result of planning restraints on land, the prices on the Sunshine Coast rose rapidly after 2001 -- in Maroochy from about $90,000 to about $230,000. Only 2 per cent of the area is urbanised and it is surrounded by undeveloped land. Yet planning restricts the supply of raw land and if land is approved for housing development its value is increased one hundredfold. Farmland worth $5000 a hectare becomes worth half a million dollars once a stroke of a pen means it is approved for dwellings.
The State Government also stings new developments for about $14,000 in infrastructure charges. But it is the development restraint that is damaging the Queensland housing market.
And the local elections show widespread voter support for such measures. The openness of development that created buzzing holiday resorts in the Gold Coast, Cairns and the Sunshine Coast is reversing. Those that have got in are building walls around their cities and preventing any development outside those walls.
They are doubtless aware that this will raise the value of their own properties but this imposes a heavy penalty on newcomers, including those without their own home.
We must roll back regulations that prevent people buying, selling or developing their own properties. There is a legitimate role for withholding permission for proposals that would harm existing properties. But it should not be permissible for regulations to create scarcity thereby raising incumbents' property values.
The local elections in regional Queensland have presented the State Government with a headache. It has to protect the rights of those who do not currently own a home or want to buy a new one against those who want to shut them out or impose a high price on them. Failure to do so will not only exacerbate the state's housing crisis but it will also slow the development of the tourist-based industries.
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