Page 4483 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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Further, the rental income for community housing is boosted by their ability to attract commonwealth rent assistance from the Australian government—a source of revenue that is not available to public housing providers. That is a significant point. Community housing can attract commonwealth rent assistance, and that is a significant amount of money that goes into their coffers. In addition, larger community housing organisations such as Havelock Housing Association are funded from the retention of rents from tenants. So they have got CRA plus those rents.
An independent consultant indicated that Housing ACT should charge the community housing providers at least 50 per cent of the market rent for each property to cover property ownership costs. However, Havelock Housing Association, which is a recipient of the highest number of head leased properties from Housing ACT, pays no more than 35 per cent of market rent—a considerable subsidy. For Ainslie Village, which has transitioned to a community housing site, Havelock House receives a payment of $374,000 per annum to assist in managing the high-needs tenants at Ainslie Village, as well as retaining approximately $556,000 in rental receipts per annum. There are incentives in this funding structure to encourage providers towards the provision of high-quality housing services. For example, the more rent collected, the more viability of the organisation improves and better services for the tenants can be provided.
Public housing is doing a fine job for people with an income of under $33,000, and we are increasing affordable housing options for people in these income brackets. Community housing’s place in this continuum sits between public and affordable options to provide unique housing options to those on incomes up to $50,000. In some cases, community housing providers are providing an affordable rental option by charging rent at 74.9 per cent of market rent. Social housing providers cannot afford to be competing for the same client group. We must work together to concentrate on a more seamless system of housing options.
On the expenditure side, the taxation concessions and concessions for other government rates, taxes and charges mean that the costs of community housing are lower than those for public housing. I will give a quick summary of those benefits enjoyed by community housing in this regard. In the last five years of the commonwealth-state housing agreement, the ACT was one of the few jurisdictions to grow its public housing stock despite the financial disadvantages facing public housing. This government’s commitment to the growth of affordable housing will enable the not-for-profit sector to enhance housing options and products already provided by Housing ACT and the community housing sector.
I reiterate that we are not opposing the second half of the Greens’ motion just for its own sake. We are opposing it because there are practical difficulties in our doing this. The first one is that we would be duplicating work which has already been done, and that would seem to be a cost that the taxpayer should not bear here unnecessarily. The federal government has commissioned KPMG to do such a comparison. The problem for us in the ACT is that we cannot insist upon seeing the data from the other jurisdictions. We can ask for it, but my experience in the past has been that you get it quite readily from a couple of jurisdictions but not from a couple of the others. Some
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