Page 957 - Week 03 - Thursday, 7 April 2022
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The form we build and the way we build it is not going to automatically give us a better health outcome. What we need to look at doing is how we build our city as a whole, how we provide access and how we provide the opportunity to connect. It is not going to be about whether we live in a high-rise apartment or a block out in the country, or anything in between those two. It is about what we do for all the spaces in between. It is what we do with the public spaces. It is what we do with the collective buildings.
To sit here and say that if you live in a tall apartment building you are going to have a terrible health outcome is actually quite dangerous. It is cherry-picking the evidence that is there and it is misrepresenting it. Every house form that we have, every typology that we use, will have its pros and cons. If we had housing correct we would still be building the same houses we built a thousand years ago. There is always room for improvement. Form follows function. If the function we want is to have healthy people who live in houses that contribute to their health then we need to have a range of housing that meets all the circumstances of our diverse community.
Listening to some of the debate today, we would be of the belief that the only housing type that suits people is something that is for a large family. We know that families come in all different shapes and sizes. You will have single households, you will have couple households, you will have people with children, and you will have empty nesters. We have got a lot of people coming into our housing market and into the housing mix that we have never seen before that we need to respond to.
One of the largest growing cohorts that we need our housing to respond to is older women who have separated, who are saying that now that they do not have the superannuation because they have stayed home and looked after their kids, and they do not have the income, they need a place where they can stay, where they can find housing. This is what we need to do. We need to start looking at the diversity in our community, not whittling it down to: “If we build this one type of housing we will create a utopia.” We need to start looking at our diverse population, looking at the needs that they have and seeing what we need to do.
This is what the minister has been doing for the whole time I have been in this place. He has been working through it with his directorate and actually going out there and saying, “What are the very diverse types of housing that we need in our city? What are we missing?” That missing middle that we all talk about is not unique to Canberra; it is in a lot of places. We are actively working towards rectifying that and how we put that into our city so that we not only have the existing stock, which has been done well for a period of time, but are now responding to these new and emerging needs that we have not quite captured within our built form. We have seen a lot of places coming up.
Mr Assistant Speaker, I put the offer out to anyone who wants to come and do a tour of my electorate: I will take you round every single housing typology that we have. I will happily drive around my electorate. I do it in my own spare time, looking at them. Once an urban planner, always an urban planner! I want to know what is going on in my electorate. You can come, you can have a look and I will show you how,
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