Page 2551 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 June 2005
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two community housing properties. These have included older persons units, group houses and five houses in a community network for people with disabilities. Specialist non-government community housing organisations such as Billabong Aboriginal Corporation, Havelock Housing Corporation, the AIDS Action Council, Anglicare and Centacare manage these and other new properties. In addition, the ACT government has funded the construction of the Gungahlin singles accommodation, a facility that contains 20 self-contained units, which is due to be completed shortly, and an indigenous boarding house. Contrast that with the attitude of the federal government on indigenous affairs.
Any consideration of affordable housing needs to take into account the requirements of those most in crisis. I refer here to the homeless or those at risk of homelessness. Our primary service response to homelessness in the ACT is through the supported accommodation assistance program, or SAAP, as it is known. ACT SAAP agencies provide a broad range of accommodation and support to young people, single men and women, and sole parents and families, including women and children escaping domestic violence. These services extend beyond the provision of shelter and provide other basics such as showering and meals. Importantly, the services provide programs to assist people to achieve self-reliance and to live independently.
In the ACT, 29 SAAP agencies are currently funded to provide 51 services at a cost to the territory of more than $4.6 million. In April 2004, we launched the ACT homelessness strategy, which sets down a community-based plan of action to address the causes and effects of homelessness. In the 2003-04 budget, we underpinned this initiative with a funding allocation of more than $13 million over four years. This has delivered a raft of services identified as priorities in the homelessness strategy. We have, for example, enabled the establishment of crisis accommodation for six families in both Belconnen and Tuggeranong. Medium term accommodation is also in place across Canberra for six families headed by a single male. The report I table today contains a description of these and many other services established to date under the homelessness strategy.
The issue of housing affordability is beyond the financial capacity of the ACT government to deal with on its own. There are, we believe, considerable national challenges for the Australian government, particularly in the areas of taxation and income support reform. We have long argued that the Australian government has an important role to play in the development of a national housing policy, in an ongoing commonwealth-state housing agreement and in further assisting people in the private rental market through the commonwealth rental assistance, the CRA.
The CRA is the major national policy lever to influence affordability in the private rental market. As members know, it is a non-taxable supplementary payment, made by the Australian government, to help recipients of income support payments with the cost of private rental housing. Nationally, 35 per cent of CRA recipients continue to pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rents—figures that suggest the CRA could be better designed by the Australian government to reduce housing stress. In regard to public housing, the ACT, like other jurisdictions, is also faced with declining commonwealth funding in real terms under the commonwealth-state housing agreement. This has placed further pressure on the ability of states and territories to maintain and grow their public housing portfolios.
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