Page 2518 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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of the residents involved greater, and the cost of support lower, than a move to nominally more appropriate accommodation would provide.
There would be provision for Housing ACT to show considerable discretion in how it applies its move-on powers. However, all the changes to the expectations of housing providers in the ACT, the diminishing resources available to them and the numbers-driven performance requirements provide no reassurance on this matter. That is why the ongoing role of community-based advocacy groups is so important. The unfortunate relationship that has grown up between the government and the community sector ought to be addressed as soon as possible. I know that the government pretends that there are no problems with those relationships and rejected the recommendation of the estimates committee that it seek to repair them.
It is a fascinating thing when one half of a relationship believes that there are problems but the other half does not. There are lots of marriages like that. This is a bit like an old-fashioned marriage where the husband earns the money, argues that he understands better what is needed, needs certain services for the funds he provides, and does not see any need to sit down with his wife and sort out any problems that she sees occurring in their partnership.
Some of these marriage problems are clearly created by the benchmarking requirements that flow from the still secret functional review. On that matter, I would like to say this. We all know that the review was prepared for cabinet, and in that context the government has every right to keep it confidential. There is, however, no obligation—no obligation at all, not even the remote suggestion of an obligation—to keep it confidential. It is simply a choice of this government that the review has been kept secret. If the government is so embarrassed about what it says or does not say that it wants to keep it a secret, it can. But can we just get over the pretence that it has an obligation to do so? Anyway, the performance standards, the limits to access, the shift away from real security of tenure, which is what people signed up to when they signed their tenancy agreements, and the increasing marginalisation of Housing ACT residents are only in part shaped by the secret, embarrassing review.
Another part of the equation is the national context: rental rebates, first home buyer assistance, capital gains taxation advantages, negative gearing provisions and a cut in funding for growing public housing. Looking into the future, if the federal government is returned, we probably face privatised public housing—the Brough vision of public housing, or perhaps the Mulcahy vision of public housing, which I can only imagine will be more tightly focused on only the deserving poor, those with little prospect of pulling themselves into better lives. If those private providers take the approach of this government, it will be able to tighten eligibility to about 20 or 30 people in Canberra, and then it will have a 100 per cent success rate. Those who take a colour-by-number approach to essential social services would judge that a success.
On top of that, we have a booming local economy that both swallows up rental property and drives up the price of home purchases. The combination of this government’s desperate desire to look as though it is looking after everyone deserving within the national constraints and local pressures has led to a model of public housing which is socially and economically divisive. On the one hand, the convenient
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