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and going to further depress the market prices by the swamping of a whole lot of extra accommodation on the market? These questions have to be addressed. How many houses are likely to be sold? What is the Housing Trust’s capacity to replace them? This is a major shift in policy and we are entitled to have some vigorous analysis before us before these decisions are glibly made.

Similarly, we heard the Minister say:

I have been concerned with the amount of money that is outstanding to the Government from its tenants, either through rent arrears or through damage or unpaid tenant maintenance.

Mr Humphries: That is his voice exactly.

MS McRAE: I am doing well, am I not? You never know; I might be Minister next. This sort of sentiment casts a pall, unfortunately, over all Housing Trust residents. We need to know what proportion of the overall budget is lost in this way. Of course we do not want any money to be owing to the Territory, but the Minister's loosely worded statements do not develop a healthy community attitude to their Housing Trust neighbours. The Minister repeated his sentiments later in his statement when he said:

All too often tenants have regarded their occupation of public housing as a right without any responsibilities being attached.

What lovely New Right rhetoric! What does it mean? How many is too many? What about all the people whom the Minister has identified as being eager to buy their properties quickly? Are they the ones who are running around trashing their houses? How many people are we talking about? It is an extraordinary generalisation which means that everybody starts to look at Housing Trust tenants in a different light and starts to worry about their potential capacity to smash their own homes and everybody else's homes as well. In this city, which has prided itself on putting Housing Trust tenants throughout the city, on not marginalising them, on not creating ghettos, here we have a Minister who is starting to point the finger at people and to say, “Look out for Housing Trust tenants”. We have all seen the results of that stigma. Anybody who grew up in Melbourne or Sydney knew all about the Housing Commission kids. We knew the stigma that was attached to them. We have managed to avoid it thus far in Canberra. I call on the Minister to consider his words carefully and not breed an atmosphere of contempt for people in Housing Trust houses.

Finally, I would like to comment on the Minister's thoughts on housing redevelopment. He indicates that joint venture work may yield better quality accommodation for tenants. That is true, and we have seen it over and over again. I have no problem at all with that. What I am concerned about, and what I would like to hear more about, is what he does not say and what is of greater importance here. What I would like to hear about is what guarantee the Minister can give in regard to the location of any newly developed houses, and whether tenants will have some guarantee that they can remain in the same streets

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