Page 3086 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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We needed to make sure that the percentage of deposit was within their means, that their repayments were within their means and we needed to have just the right product for them. The way we figured to do that was to go to the open marketplace to get a financial institution to do the work. We are now at that point. I am confident that in the next couple of months we will be able to launch it and it will be fabulous.
It also had changed in its focus. Originally, we said that a person could buy, for example, 75 per cent of the house, and that is where it would stay. Now what we are saying is that 51 per cent gives you proprietary ownership of the place. You cannot get kicked out because you own 51 per cent of it. But it is better, if you are going to hand it down to your family, to have 100 per cent of it. We want people to have 100 per cent of it because the theme on that is at an all-time high.
We now will require people to use the equity that has accrued on that property to buy the rest of it over a certain period of time. I think it is five years, maybe 10. That is where we are at. The idea is that we shift the ground, we hope and we believe, to the benefit of our tenants that will buy the places.
I turn to Mr Coe’s point and to a couple of comments that Mr Hanson was making across the chamber about those people with the ability to pay. One of the things that worried us was whether or not people had a right to unlimited tenure—a right—and therefore would need to be compensated. When we achieved self-government we were given certain caveats, if you like, on self-government. One was you cannot take property away from somebody without due compensation.
An expectation was regarded as property. Something that had been an expectation for 40 years was regarded as property. So we were in a bit of a bind about whether we could impose an exit strategy on somebody. We also did not have the ability to say to people, “How much do you earn?” The people who we did know that about were the people in receipt of rebates, because you have to declare your income to get a rebate.
So we knew at that time that 83 per cent of our tenants were below a certain figure. But we did not have the right to ask the other 17 per cent. As it happens, where we are at at the moment is 88 per cent. It has grown that five per cent in just over two years. So we changed the Housing Assistance Act to actually give us the ability, the power, the authority—call it what you will—to say to people, “Tell us your income for the last 12 months.”
Our policy is that if you have a sustained income of over $80,000 a year, we will ask you to consider buying the house from us under a shared equity scheme, buying it outright under the sales to tenants scheme or going out into the private marketplace. We will ask them to do that and show them how they can actually achieve that. In some cases, we even discuss downsizing with them. But we will know who they are.
We are talking about something like 1,400 of our tenants being market renters, but we need to understand that some of those market renters are paying $90 a week for a bed-sitter in Ainslie Avenue. They cannot get properties like that anywhere else. So they are going to be with us until they either move on or they die. Then we start to
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