Page 3243 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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For example, they cut the eligible income threshold for a couple with a child by 37 per cent, from $1,000 to $700 a week. This has had the effect of keeping the working poor out of public housing, while private rents have become so high that they are not able to rent in the private market.
There is a very slow turnaround time on preparing housing properties for tenants. I have brought that up many times in this place. We have heard of cases of places sitting idle for as long as five months. At May this year, there were 371 properties sitting idle. The 2006-07 budget papers indicated that Housing ACT, under the Stanhope Labor government, was only managing 11,272 properties—127 less than under the last Liberal government in the ACT. However, it seems they then got a bit of momentum and now it is around 11,600 properties. Worthy of mention here is the fact that the government is also behind in collecting debt from housing clients, with 1,612 owing a total of $1,245,929.37 as at March 2008.
The Stanhope Labor government continues to neglect public housing, with little in the latest budget, at a time when housing has never been more unaffordable in the ACT. Only 10 million of the government’s Building the Future fund of $1 billion has been allocated to public housing. Despite having the highest number of public housing properties per capita in Australia, this government is doing a poor job of housing those who need public housing.
At some point in 2007, it is interesting to note that the Chief Minister must have had a “Damascus” moment. I do not know whether he fell off a ride-on mower or the like, but all of a sudden, he discovered that there was a problem with a lack of affordable housing. So we were to ignore all those media releases that went before, and which told us how affordable Canberra housing was, because it clearly was not the case after all. So enter Jon Stanhope, who came rushing in, just like he did after the bushfires, hoping we would not notice his government’s ineptitude in adding to the magnitude of the problem after a long period of neglect and punishing taxes.
The plan to expand affordable housing through Community Housing Canberra is, like everything else with this government, a sleight of hand. The fact is that the affordable housing offered at a cost of $40 million in government funding to Community Housing Canberra and the transfer of 132 public housing properties does not do anything to help the people who have found themselves made ineligible overnight by the decision in the horror budget of 2006-07 to severely limit eligibility criteria for public housing. This has left low-income workers with nowhere to go because they certainly cannot afford to rent in the private rental market.
The model being used by CHC works on 75 per cent of market rents. This leaves a huge gap between public housing, which works on 25 per cent of income. The affordable housing is effectively middle-class welfare. It is for households on $50,000 to $74,000 per annum. What about the people earning $30,000? Where do they go? There is a huge void left by the hatchet that the government took to eligibility rules for public housing, and this housing affordability scheme they are talking up, around Community Housing Canberra, does not fill this cohort of people at all.
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