Page 3348 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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underdeveloped and undesirable place for many residents. We feel that these estate agreements would allow for a much better utilisation of resources and improved monitoring of service delivery and performance of the landlord—in this case housing. We feel they would provide public housing tenants with a sense of involvement and commitment on how housing is managed in a way that complements the needs of residents and reinforces their rights and responsibilities.
As well as that, New South Wales have acceptable behaviour agreements. In the past—I am going back close to 10 or 11 years—difficult tenants often did not pay their rent. I remember when I introduced policies to make sure that, after warnings, people who did not pay their rent were evicted. Housing managed to get rid of a lot of undesirable tenants who also had other problems and made life a misery for people.
It was often difficult then to get other tenants to go to court if they had trouble with their neighbours. In those days, luckily, most of the difficult people tended to be bad rent payers. I have noticed a new phenomenon over the last five or six years—that is that a lot of these difficult tenants do pay their rent. They are not evicted for that. Another phenomenon is that many people who are victims are now prepared to go to the tribunal and give evidence against those people.
There is a street in Kaleen where there are some incredibly difficult tenants—currently I think before the tribunal. Still nothing seems to happen there. Perhaps we also need to look at how well the tribunal is operating. But acceptable behaviour agreements are certainly the way to go, because once an unruly, difficult, selfish, antisocial tenant signs that agreement—and they would only sign it after there was a series of problems with them—that would be basically it. If they then breached that, they would be out. It is only a very small minority but these people are making other people’s lives a misery. There are obviously great difficulties in terms of how this is enforced. Cooperation is needed between police and housing.
Mr Pratt said that a lot of these people are known to police. Why should they be above the law? Why should they not be dealt with according to the law? If they are making life a misery for other people—ordinary, decent, law-abiding battlers in housing complexes—why should the authorities—in this case the government—not deal firmly with these antisocial, totally selfish tenants who are preying on often elderly, frail, defenceless co-tenants? It is not acceptable, and we need to take some steps against it.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (5.32): I will not speak for long. I know there is a bit of anxiety to get onto the human rights commission legislation, but I feel that I need to contribute something to this debate. The topic of Mr Pratt’s MPI is “The impact of antisocial and criminal behaviour in the ACT”. I want to draw a distinction between criminal behaviour and antisocial behaviour. I believe every one of us here would agree that there need to be proper measures taken to prevent criminal behaviour in the ACT, but it is the term “antisocial” that I think requires some delving into.
Just listening to the language of Mr Stefaniak—I admit that I did not pay such close attention to Mr Pratt’s speech; so I cannot comment on the language he used—I have heard these words before from the Liberals. The words were “ordinary, decent, law-abiding people”. That is meant to evoke I do not know what to someone like Steve or Bill. I am not sure.
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