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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1616 ..

Mrs Burke: Is this a critique of my motion wording or are you going to answer the-

MR WOOD: It was in your words today You began your speech with the words "recent widespread antisocial behaviour". There was some moderation in the words today. Perhaps that was because you had received the same calls as my office from people at Lyons saying, "We don't like having our name flashed up in the news."I just put that as a point to think of in the future. I encourage you to be active about housing-I really do like people to be active about housing-but I urge you to be careful about the words used, the stereotyping and the sweeping statements.

Mrs Burke: The same applies to you, Minister.

MR WOOD: Yes. I am very careful, actually. I am a bit of a pedant; I am very careful with my words. They are usually pretty modest and well-chosen and I am not prone to exaggeration. That is unusual, perhaps, for a politician, but it is certainly the case.

There is a problem in the community as a whole relating to drugs and crime. Therefore, in public housing there is a problem, and we deal with it. We deal as best we can with it. When people sign up to an agreement it gives them certain rights and obligations and it gives ACT Housing certain rights and obligations. Incidentally, one of the obligations of tenants is to pay their rent. It is one of the obligations they sign on to, might I say, so do not forget that amongst all the issues.

Mrs Burke: If they're not getting maintenance, why would they pay the rent on time? What is the incentive?

MR WOOD: We have paid attention, and I give credit to the former government for doing so, to particular problems that you can find in any large complex. You should be aware of some of the complaints that I am getting out of one complex in Canberra at the moment. It happens to be in the private sector, but complexes can bring problems. I bet you have all experienced that.

But what do we do? I won't mention names, but there was one place where things were developing in a way that we were not happy with and the tenants certainly were not. We put a specialist team in there for a whole three months. We added a lot of expenditure to that item. We separated the backyards of the ground floor units, we did some more landscaping, and we put in some measures to control through traffic. We put in some physical measures and we also put in some people to lend support, because the best thing you can do with housing is to build in support for the people.

The community is the best manager of a property. At a refurbished place I went to recently in one of our suburbs there is a wonderful community organisation. At another spot which was once a degree of a problem for one of Mr Stefaniak's successors-I think that Mr Moore was the minister at the time-there are wonderful gardens and there is a wonderful community spirit. Problems still emerge, but the situation is very much better than it used to be because the community in that complex

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