Discrimination with landowners

The Prime Minister has stated that one of the reasons for the proposed revision to development boundaries is social, namely the need to do justice with landowners whose land was excluded from the temporary development boundaries laid down in 1987 or 1988.

If this is indeed the case, I find it unjust and discriminatory to draw the line at 1987. What about those people who had purchased plots with building permits, and whose land was arbitrarily declared to lie outside development boundaries before 1987? I am referring to the huge injustice done to a number of people, including myself, who had purchased a plot of land within the development boundaries in the early 1980s, only to find such boundaries revoked in 1982, when the Building Development Areas Act (BDA) came into force.

At the stroke of a pen, our life savings were wiped out. Not only that, but these areas themselves were degraded beyond restoration. A number of plots were developed, legally, before the enactment of the BDA, while the rest of the plots were frozen in limbo. To this day, these isolated terraced houses stand alone amidst a wasteland of half-finished foundations, building debris and illegal dumping.

Despite the fact that these people suffered a grave injustice long before 1987, and despite the fact that the areas affected have become an ugly scar on the face of the landscape, the authorities do not appear to be prepared to do anything to compensate the "victims" of the BDA.

These people are not land developers or speculators, but ordinary citizens who have been robbed of their life savings and who have been waiting patiently for justice to be done for the past 25 years.