A parliamentary report into developer contributions associated with land development has contradicted the long-held view of the sector that such contributions are always passed on to purchasers.
Chaired by John D’Orazio, the parliamentary committee found that developer contri-butions are not generally passed on to the land purchaser, but rather paid for by the original landowner.
“In other words, increasing the cost of developing land tends to decrease the value of unde-veloped land,” the report says.
“This is contrary to the argument put forward by the development industry, which has long argued the impact on housing affordability.”
The report also found that land developments that “leap-frog” the existing developed urban area should fund the extensions to the infrastructure required to support them.
The Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) recently commissioned consul-tants Syme Marmion and Co to undertake research in response to the parliamentary report.
UDIA WA executive director Marion Fulker said individual developers accepted and upheld their responsibility to contribute to the cost of constructing new infrastructure to meet the direct needs of the new communities they developed.
“However, the community and property industry are already very highly taxed in WA and this money should be used efficiently to fund infrastructure projects that are needed to support both the existing community and the future growth of the state,” Ms Fulker said.
“This could be achieved if more efficient mechanisms for infrastructure funding were identified and if there was better co-ordination between planning for infrastructure provision and the town-planning process.
“We believe that introducing new levies or charges to be borne by new home purchasers for infrastructure that is a government responsibility would be an unfair and dangerous move by any newly elected government.”
In May last year Planning and Infrastructure Minister Alannah MacTiernan told WA Business News that the Government had no intention of implementing developer levies.
“It has always been my stance that we would never do anything like that without a broad-based consultation process,” Ms MacTiernan said.