Page 2888 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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a horror budget that saw 23 schools closed, the closure of the much-loved Griffith library—which actually only needed about $500,000 a year to run—and the closure of the Civic shopfront. That has led to considerable waiting times at the remaining shopfronts in Canberra.
This year, Mr Speaker, we learnt of the $1 million the Stanhope government is giving for one artwork at the entrance to Canberra. That is not to mention the $750,000 we hear about for a pile of rocks—which I thought the builders had put up as some sort of a joke—along Gungahlin Drive, apparently commemorating the bogong moth. These are the things that rankle with people. This is a government that used to criticise us for a futsal slab, which cost $250,000, where at least some matches were played, including, I think, an international match. What on earth are you going to do with a pile of rocks on the Gungahlin Drive, except have people look at it rather than concentrating on the road? Not a smart idea.
Canberra and the ACT have needlessly suffered under this government over the past six years, and this is despite boom years which have seen the government rake in stamp duty and pocket vastly increased funding from the commonwealth government due to GST. Indeed, GST revenue has grown by 50 per cent since its inception, and this year the government will receive $823 million to spend where it likes, and, obviously, next year it will be even more. Despite the huge bounty it has been receiving both from property taxes and from the commonwealth, the ACT government has ramped up taxes and charges. These are increasing housing unaffordability in the ACT, and they are pushing more vulnerable groups—low-income earners, pensioners, self-funded retirees, single parents and renters—into all sorts of problems.
Today the Chief Minister said on radio that his achievement had been that the ACT has the most public housing properties per capita in the nation. He is gilding the lily there, as so often he does. Historically we have always had a lot of public housing; we started off with 96 per cent in 1950. After a while, I think the Northern Territory had more than us, but we still had a significant level for historical reasons. It is the nature of Canberra. It has really got nothing to do with Mr Stanhope, who, as usual, seeks to take credit for the achievements of others.
In actual fact, the public housing portfolio has remained pretty stagnant since 2001 when the government came to office, hovering between 11,000 and 11,500 properties. Indeed, it was 11,399 in 2001—which rather gives the game away—when the Liberals left office. So in six years we have seen no increase from this government, but we have seen very low re-letting times and large multi-unit public housing complexes standing idle for years.
In the horror budget we saw, too, Labor’s way of cutting the waiting lists for public housing, and it raised the bar of eligibility for new applicants to public housing to absurdly low levels of income. Now this severely disadvantages many of the working poor. It is interesting in Anti-Poverty Week that we dwell on this, because it makes them ineligible for public housing. There has been a 37 per cent income threshold increase for a couple; it has gone down to, I think, $700 a week as opposed to $1,000 a week—a drop of 37 per cent. Of course, we have the second highest rental costs in the country for houses and flats respectively.
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