Page 4485 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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gives the Assembly another opportunity to debate the role of community housing providers in the social housing sector in the ACT. They can, and should, play a larger role in this sector, I believe.
As many will know from my previous remarks on this topic in the chamber, the community housing sector is important because it can provide assistance to people in an often much more efficient and sensitive manner than can public housing. Individual circumstances are often better catered for by the diverse range of options that can be provided by the community housing organisations that exist in the ACT. Indeed, the Productivity Commission, in its report on government services in 2006, described community housing as follows:
Community housing is generally managed by not-for-profit organisations or local governments, which perform asset and tenancy management functions. A major objective of community housing is to increase social capital by encouraging local communities to take a more active role in planning and managing appropriate and affordable transitional and long term rental accommodation. Community housing is also intended to provide a choice of housing location, physical type and management arrangements. Some forms of community housing also allow tenants to participate in the management of their housing.
Community housing programs aim to achieve links between housing and services that are best managed at the community level, including services for people with a disability, and home and community care. Notwithstanding their common objectives, community housing programs vary within and across jurisdictions in their administration and types of accommodation.
That is an important point which I will come back to very shortly. Ms Bresnan’s motion notes the growing role of non-government housing providers in the supply and management of supported affordable housing. It also notes the impact that the ownership of housing, and its condition, can make to providers’ viability, and the impact that government funding settings have on the quality of the providers’ services.
On that I will slightly deviate and reiterate what I said in the debate on the previous motion—that I notice an inconsistency with the Greens here. The last motion, which Mr Hanson put forward, was on the role of the private sector in health care and the role that Calvary hospital has in the suite of health options in the ACT. It was very interesting that the Greens seemed to be quite opposed to having a non-government provider in the healthcare space, yet they are very interested in having non-government providers in the housing space. Taking a philosophical approach to this, there is not much of a difference in terms of housing and health care. If the Greens were consistent with their philosophy and the application of their philosophy on these motions then surely they would have supported the previous motion.
Going back to this particular motion and its benefits, the benefits of community housing to Canberrans, I welcome the motion’s call for an independent comparative analysis. I think that is important. Many problems and inefficiencies can arise in a federal system of government, but one of the advantages when you have multiple jurisdictions at the same level in that second tier of government is that you can compare data and you can compare the performance of states against territories, just
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