An inquiry into housing and rental affordability has found that introducing a vacancy tax would not be useful in improving housing supply in the ACT.
The committee heard from several witnesses and submissions about the proposition of a vacancy tax on improving affordable housing in the ACT.
In their submission to the inquiry, the ACT government said census data showed that Canberra has a low proportion of unoccupied private dwellings when compared to other major capital cities in Australia.
Like other Australian jurisdictions, the ACT government relies on water usage data to identify vacant dwellings. The government noted limitations in using this method to identify unoccupied dwellings.
"Currently, state and local governments have limited means to identify properties that are intentionally left vacant. Therefore, there is a significant level of speculation as to the level of vacancy," the ACT government said in its submission.
6.6 per cent of Canberra dwellings were unoccupied compared to 8.3 per cent in Sydney and 10 per cent in Melbourne.
Due to the small proportion of vacancies, and limited means to identify the number of properties left intentionally vacant, the committee found that a vacancy tax would not be a useful tax setting to improve housing affordability.
Instead, the committee recommended the government should focus its resources on other areas.
ACT Council of Social Service said the government's priority should be providing more social and affordable housing, not investigating the issue of a vacancy tax.
"For people on Jobseeker, there is not a single property in the private rental market that is available to rent. If you are on youth allowance, there is not even a room in a shared house that is affordable to rent in the ACT or Queanbeyan, in New South Wales," ACTOSS said.
Greater Canberra advocated for zoning reform, arguing the RZ1 zoning rule should allow unit-titled duplexes, triplexes, and terraced housing on larger blocks and multi-unit projects.
"In our view, the best method that we have to increase large amounts of additional housing supply is zoning reform. And zoning reform is quite cheap. All we need to do is go through the effort of redesigning the zoning rules and equivalent planning processes," Greater Canberra said.
Several other submissions also advocated for greater investment in public housing by the government, as well as broader changes to allow community housing providers to construct more social housing.
Appearing before the committee Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the ACT government could not afford to do all the heavy lifting and would have to attract private capital into housing.
"The reality is that the government's balance sheet cannot fund every single new housing dwelling that is needed in the territory. We have to attract private capital into housing," Mr Barr said.
On the topic of increasing housing supply, Mr Barr said the local construction sector was already operating at full capacity.
"There are material constraints and resources. We have an unemployment rate at 2.7 per cent. There are two job vacancies for every unemployed person at the moment. So the economy is at full tilt. There is no surplus capacity," he said.
The government reiterated its ambitions to increase the number of rental properties in the territory through large-scale build-to-rent.
"I want thousands of additional rental properties - we will all be very old if we are waiting for one investor at a time to do it, so that is not the pathway to get to the desired outcome. It is through large-scale institutional build to rent," Mr Barr said.
Other recommendations from the wide-ranging inquiry included the promotion of the affordable land tax concession scheme, policy solutions for short-term rental accommodations, and encouraging the construction of more three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments and townhouses.
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