Page 3087 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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come down a little bit because these people are on Centrelink benefits. We estimate that we are probably looking at fewer than 500 people out of the 11½ thousand tenancies who are earning over $80,000 a year.
A sustained income is something which has been over 80,000 for the last three years. One of the issues for us is that it is quite regular in this town that people will have an income of in excess of $80,000, and have had it for the last five years. But in the next two years they will drop down to $50,000 or $60,000 because they are retiring from the public service and taking their superannuation. They are going from, say, an EL1 or SOGC position or greater where their salary is $80,000; they retire, take their superannuation pension and they have only got a pension of $60,000. They are under the figure. So their tenancy is not going to be a sustained one but we will not know that until we talk to them.
The plan is that as soon as we are aware that everybody has got this figure of over $80,000 we are going to knock on their door and say to them, “We are going to come back and talk to you again in 12 months unless we can come to an agreement.” Whilst we cannot require them to talk, we are actually going to go and talk to them quite significantly about that. I hope that gives a bit of a picture.
Mr Hanson: Is there anything in the act, when you go back in 12 months, that lets you do something about it?
MR HARGREAVES: We cannot impose it on anybody at the moment. We do not have that power under the act to evict someone because their income is at a certain level. But we can go to them and say to them, “These are the options we would like you to consider, please.” We can appeal to their better nature. We do not expect a 100 per cent success out of this, but any success will be better than no success, which is what we have had in the recent times. We will see how that goes.
We are seeing a growth, though, in the number of rebated tenancies. I said originally that it was 83 per cent a couple of years ago; it is now 88 per cent. I predicted four years ago that in the not-too-far-distant future it would be 100 per cent, in which case it does not matter. That is the position that I just wanted to assist you with.
The other thing related to the maintenance of market renters that Ms Bresnan referred to. She is quite right. If we have market renters they actually contribute to the maintenance of our properties. The problem forward in a budgetary sense for any incoming government, whether it is a Labor government or Liberal government, is that if we take the market renters out of the game, that amount of money that they are paying over and above, which is the market rent compared to what we are doing as a rebate, we have to find in the budget as a recurrent figure for the maintenance. We have to replace it. The more successful we are in moving the market renters on the more impact on ensuing budgets we are going to have. We are aware of that. It is up around the $20-something million mark. So it is not an insignificant figure.
Ms Bresnan is not quite right in her reference to the green advice that we sought. We did not react to the suggestion and then go and get it. It was always part of the process and it has been part of the process for a long time with us in terms of our housing
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