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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1578 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

As I said, there has been concern about affordable housing. That came up through the poverty task force. It was brought up a lot in estimates by the community sector. We support the poverty task force's recommendation that an affordable housing task force be established. That was a very important recommendation of the poverty task force.

As members are aware, the poverty profile in the ACT is different from that in other places in Australia. Some of the distinguishing characteristics of poverty here are that people in poverty are more likely to be in single-person or single-parent households and they are less likely to be working. Particular issues that contribute to poverty in Canberra are the costs of housing and transport. We support the work of the poverty task force by recommending again that we get serious about looking at housing.

We also recommend that the community linkages in housing program, which is to be commended and looks as though it will be a good service in linking public housing tenants to community service support of various kinds, also apply to the Applicant Service Centre. I suggest that that would be very good long-term preventative policy initiative.

There is also a recommendation about what happens to families with children who are evicted. The committee has recommended that the government examine a means of ensuring the ongoing provision of emergency housing, within the same local area where possible, for tenants with children who face eviction. As we know, a huge disruptive force in any child's life is losing their home. In any human's life there are three major traumatic incidents they can experience: death of someone that they love, divorce and moving house.

If parents, for whatever reason, are not able to maintain a tenancy in a responsible manner, the majority of the committee felt that there was a case to look at the children. It is not appropriate for government to wipe their hands of responsibility for those children, because they are innocent. The long-term costs to society of exposing such children to more trauma are extreme. Why would any community want to see children traumatised further?

We know the cost to society in the long run, apart from having compassion for the children. The issue for society in the long term is that traumatised children are more likely to behave in an antisocial way, more likely to become addicted to drugs and more likely to resort to crime. The Commonwealth government's paper Pathways to Prevention a couple of years ago supported the absolute need to ensure that we try to protect children as much as possible.

The argument against that from the minister and others was that it gets to the point where if people do not pay their rent then they have to go; that if you do not take a hard line Housing will be flooded by people who do not pay their rent. I asked for the evidence for that assumption. Government usually tells us that the majority of public housing tenants are very responsible. We need to look carefully at assumptions like that if they are used as rationale for a policy decision such as this. There may well be some argument for that, but you have to balance that against the cost to society and to those children. That is the discussion this recommendation brings up.

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