Page 240 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 30 May 1989
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The Rally congratulates the Housing Trust on its developments for the aged, such as the one close to the Yarralumla shops. In this Territory we should see more of those developments which are close to shopping and which fit within the aged persons unit accommodation criteria.
The Rally also thinks that the trust must take practical steps to tackle the plight of the homeless, especially homeless youth and those in crisis. We are looking for better communication between the trust and the groups in the suburbs which have been allocated homes for respite and other emergency housing arrangements.
The Rally of course has a proposal, which it hopes the Minister will look at carefully, to introduce a scheme for public housing tenants to take up equity shareholding in their homes. The Rally has devised fairly sophisticated proposals to deal with unit purchasing and percentage buying, and those details have been available for some time from the Rally. The benefits of this progressive equity participation scheme, the PEP scheme as the Rally says, would be to allow tenants to bridge the deposit gap by progressively taking up small shares in their homes as circumstances permit. As we know, one of the biggest factors facing particularly young couples is that they borrow the deposit from relatives and are not altogether frank with lenders, and of course they get into a disastrous situation when they are on those easy start loans.
The other advantage of the PEP scheme, as far as the Rally sees it, is that tenants have a vested interest in maintaining the homes, and that would indirectly reduce the maintenance vote of the Housing Trust. Therefore, they can buy it, and at the same time they can maintain it and be kept to the mark on that score. The Rally thinks that the PEP scheme will free up some capital investment from the trust in due course. We can, as Mr Duby mentioned, look at some joint venture along the scale of the South Australian Housing Trust in that area. The Housing Trust could look at directing the maintenance and supervisory resources of the trust to ensure that those activities blend in more with other maintenance and supervisory roles elsewhere in the ACT Administration.
The Rally supports the ACT Housing Trust draft policies on the sales to tenants at market prices of homes, provided that, as Mr Duby said, overall stocks, or percentage of stocks, are retained in suburbs, and that we do not sell off our silver in the older suburbs.
MR WOOD (3.45): I join my colleagues in expressing the importance that we attach to the question of housing. Few issues in our society today are more important. If we think back on our own lives, we can think of the enormous resources and the time and effort we have put into our homes, reflecting, I suppose too infrequently, how
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