Page 4211 - Week 11 - Thursday, 17 Sept 2009

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MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo), by leave: As my colleague Ms Hunter has said, one of the biggest issues with the project has been the timing of it. This has led to quite a number of issues, I suspect. I am very pleased that the department has tried to be as sustainable as possible with the housing, but I have observed that the sustainability has often not included a north-facing orientation.

For the benefit of people who may not have spent a lot of time looking at energy efficiency issues, there is a difference between five and six stars and north facing. The five or six stars are an energy efficiency rating: you can do that solely, if you like, by having sufficient insulation; you do not have to orientate the house north. However, if you do not orientate your house north when you build it, you cannot pick it up afterwards and move it around, so it is really important that this is done.

I have observed—and I have had numerous phone calls and emails from constituents—that, particularly for stage 1 houses, this has not been one of the design criteria. We have not seen the DAs or anything for stage 2, so we cannot tell whether it is for that. I would like to put that on the record: while we are very pleased that the department is planning to move to six stars, we would really like it to ensure that it also moves to a northern orientation.

As I alluded to earlier in my question without notice, another thing that we are concerned about is the location of the projects. We do support ageing in place; obviously this is an excellent idea. But we are concerned that this is one time when the ACT government had a substantial injection of funds from the commonwealth and that even with that money it did not seem to be possible to build significantly in the town centre or inner areas of Canberra, where a large number of public housing tenants are at present. We are concerned that we may be seeing not a beginning but a continuation of the trend to moving public housing further out.

I point out a couple of recent redevelopments where this has happened: Fraser Court in Kingston and Burnie Court in Lyons. Fraser Court was 100 per cent public housing; now, as we all know, it is zero. Lyons was 100 per cent; now it is 10 per cent public housing and five per cent social housing. This is a trend which we were really hoping we would be able to arrest as a result of the additional money from the commonwealth.

Finally, I want to talk about consultation. I have had lots of calls about the stage 1 public housing. The lack of solar orientation is the number one thing, but there is also the lack of water tanks and the spray-on grass which commits the tenants to ongoing lawn maintenance. I am hoping that stage 2 will be better.

Recently I have had calls about the proposals for supportive housing. The proposals in Rivett and Chapman have had particular concerns raised. Chapman has been largely a surprise in the neighbourhood, because it was not an ex-school site so it has not been subject to the previous rounds of community consultation that the other sites have.

I would like to say again that one of the major shames is this: given that the stimulus package seems to be working economically quite well, why can’t we just slow this down a bit so we have the normal amount of community consultation about these


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