BEVERIDGE resident Neil Gaghan cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of 12 anxious months.

With the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution voted down in Parliament last week, Neil and his family are breathing a little easier.

“It’s been a hard 12 months, that’s for sure,” he said.

“I suppose the other side of it is whether they try to reintroduce the bill at another time, you just don’t know. But at the moment it’s just a sense of relief.”

Mr Gaghan, who owns a 9.3 ha property, became increasingly concerned about the GAIC after attending information sessions conducted by lobby group Taxed Out.

“It’s caused a huge amount of stress, and the uncertainty of not being able to have any options,” he said.

Like several of his neighbours, Mr Gaghan was worried about a tax being collected before the development permit stage - potentially years before any development would begin.

He also argued against the $95,000 per hectare being charged as a flat rate, saying the tax should be a percentage of the land’s sale price.

“To have that kind of tax, it was discriminatory.

“No matter where you lived, no matter how much the value of your property is, it’s just a broadacre tax, it’s just wrong,” he said.

“From where we live we were probably 15 years away from being developed, and our tax bill was about $880,000.

“That’s been all of a sudden lifted off your shoulders, at least now somebody can come along and physically put an offer in and buy our property if we wanted to move,” he said.

Mr Gaghan’s family last year considered moving to Bright, but any thoughts of relocation were put on hold.

“We were made to feel like we were prisoners.

“If something did go wrong with health or work we would have been stuffed, we would have had to offload our property for a song,” he said.

“If the government listened to the people in the first place they wouldn’t have wasted all this time.”