Page 1369 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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Housing Canberra. Both these organisations really do typify what it means to be in a community such as ours. These are not-for-profit organisations, often with a large pool of their resources coming from volunteers, contributing to their community to make it better. And they do it in a pretty efficient way, I might add.
Dr Jon Hall, who is a senior research associate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, did a study on Havelock Housing’s efficiency. It is interesting that ACT public housing costs on average $3,356 for overheads, whereas Havelock Housing, per house, per dwelling, is $1,791, so approximately $1,600 per dwelling cheaper than the ACT public housing sector. If you go into maintenance, maintenance at Havelock Housing properties is $3,237 per property; in ACT public housing it is $2,509, so an extra $800 is spent per dwelling on maintenance in Havelock Housing properties and they do it at $1,600 less than the ACT government. This is all in the work done by Dr Jon Hall, so those figures do have a fair bit of integrity behind them and are certainly worth considering when taking into account the fact that there is $102 million for this government to divvy up to community housing and to public housing.
I understand that, of that $102 million, $96 million will be spent on new acquisitions whereas $6 million will be spent on maintenance. I am told that $96 million will buy approximately 286 dwellings—286 dwellings for $96 million. That comes in at a cost of $335,664 per dwelling. That to me seems like a pretty high price when you consider that a lot of these will in fact be units. If you go and buy a one or two-bedroom unit off the plan from Independent or from some other agency that is selling off the plan, you will actually get a one-bedroom unit in some places for under $300,000 whereas this average is $335,000 per dwelling. I realise that that is an average and if they are all four-bedroom houses or five-bedroom houses that may well be a bargain, but I would think that quite a number of those would be units and really should come in less than $335,000 per unit.
I did actually request a briefing on the stimulus package as it affects Housing ACT and Community Housing and the meeting was cancelled. That was a few weeks ago. I do appreciate the fact that the minister did give me a half-hour briefing today, but it would have been nice if we had had that a couple of weeks ago, as was originally scheduled.
Last year in the territory election the Liberals put out a commitment to community housing. One of the comments that we did draw to people’s attention is the fact that the ACT is the only jurisdiction in Australia which is not seeing any growth in community housing. We are not seeing any growth in community housing, which I think is a shame given how efficient they are. Last financial year we saw approximately 100 properties transferred from Housing ACT stock to Community Housing Canberra stock, and I understand that they are meant to use that as equity to take out loans so they can then reinvest in community housing. What that did was give a big tick of approval to the work that Community Housing are doing. They transferred 100 properties to Community Housing Canberra, to CHC, and said, “You can manage these and you can own them.” That is a real tick of approval.
Havelock Housing are registered as a nationally accredited organisation when it comes to providing community housing and they are doing very good work. So it does
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