Page 3236 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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properly. We have seen the suffering of first homebuyers. We have seen the lack of compassion of this government for first homebuyers.
It is worth pointing out that this has happened under the Stanhope government; this has happened at a time when the government has control not only of land release, not only of taxation, but also it has chosen to control the vast majority of residential land development in the territory.
It is worth looking at the action plan and the recommendations that we see in the government’s so-called housing affordability strategy. Of course, a number of them are just restating things that are already being done. Recommendation 47 is that Housing ACT continue to provide housing support to households in stress on low incomes. We would expect that; it was happening already; that is nothing new.
Recommendation 51 states:
Continue to maximise the return to public housing and future joint ventures … Housing ACT to continue to better aligning stock to client needs.
We have these vague sorts of concepts and no-one can measure whether they have actually achieved them. Recommendation 55 is an interesting one for housing affordability:
Expand the stairwell model of accommodation to key client groups.
Recommendation 61:
Ensure the ACT has access to accurate data on which to base future land release and service projections and continue to work with the Australian Bureau of Statistics to ensure the availability of high quality data.
Recommendation 62:
Implement an education campaign to ensure people who move to Canberra update their address with Medicare immediately.
These are not serious measures. Let us turn to some of the more serious measures that are outlined in the government strategy. I turn to the issue of land rent. What the Stanhope government is saying to people on low to middle incomes in the territory is essentially that they will never own a home in the way that traditionally it has been understood. What they are saying is that they have abandoned them. What they are going to offer them is some sort of second-class ownership structure. They are going to offer them something that does not have the benefits of home ownership that traditionally flow to low and middle income earners in Australia.
Home ownership provides one of the great ways for families over a period of time to build up their assets and their wealth. These are not people on high incomes. These are a lot of people on low and middle incomes who have worked hard, who have worked hard to pay off their mortgages over many years on simple three and four-bedroom homes in the suburbs.
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