Page 1470 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2007
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We have a situation where families with three or more children are waiting for public housing, while single tenants are residing in three and four bedroom homes.
Minister, why have you allowed this mismatch of housing to develop to such a point of crisis?
MR HARGREAVES: By way of explanation to the Assembly, I should quote back to Mrs Burke something that is relevant to her question. In one of her press releases she said:
It’s a bit like the statement of the bleeding obvious, isn’t it, when you’ve got 500 three-bedroom properties lying idle and over 1,050 people on a waiting list urgently requiring a roof over their heads …
Then she said to the Canberra Times:
What poor management. We now have an estimated 500 taxpayer-funded public houses sitting there empty while thousands are languishing on the waiting list.
Let me make a couple of points. Her first statement was that there were a thousand people on the waiting list and then she says there are thousands of people languishing on the waiting list. Of course, very mischievously she say there are 500 three-bedroom properties lying idle. That is Mrs Burke’s interpretation.
We told the people of Canberra some time ago that where people have a bedroom over-entitlement and you divided that by three, it has the equivalence of 500 homes. This is not 500 individual properties lying idle across the community. This is Mrs Burke either getting it confused or being deliberately mischievous. I will give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest that she is once again grossly confused. Let me correct her. Firstly, there are not 500 empty properties out there. There is an equivalence in spare bedrooms in over-entitlement. Secondly, Mrs Burke really ought to apologise to the people out there in the community for misleading them by saying, as reported in the Canberra Times, that there are thousands languishing on the waiting list. I have told people in this place before—
Mrs Burke: You cut it by half. Now they are homeless.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
Mrs Burke: You took them off the waiting list and now they are homeless.
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mrs Burke!
Mrs Burke: Sorry, Mr Speaker.
MR HARGREAVES: I have said in this place before that we have just over a thousand people on the waiting list.
Mrs Burke: You know jolly well what you have done.
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