Ms Marie Hunt:

We are a property services firm. We are in the business of selling land. That is our job. We do not have a moral responsibility. Land speculation happens in every single boom. It is not down to firms such as ourselves to fix that because only government can do so. It has been an issue since 1972, when the Kenny report was published. We need to put a system in place that shares the benefit of rezoning decisions and speculation with the wider community and not just for the benefit of the owner of the land. It is about time such a structure was put in place. However, the political will has not been there to do so. The only time we saw one step towards that was in the early 2000s when the rate of capital gains tax on land was effectively halved and that brought a lot of supply of land onto the market. There was a threat that it was going to go up to 60% two or three years hence and that never happened. There was a step towards doing something about it and then it was reined in, for whatever reason. However, we are now at a critical juncture. We are in the midst of a public consultation about site value tax and I think the opportunity might be there to revisit this issue.