Page 4382 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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One of the things that you can see I am building up to in my submission about housing often no longer meeting the needs of the person who is living there is that we need to start building more adaptable housing. Again, I can mention a few houses I am aware of where we have effectively built what could become two households. For example, we can have a couple of bedroom wings with a shared living and kitchen area in the middle. Fortunately, in the last couple of years ACTPLA have relented a little bit and it is possible now to have two kitchens built in a house—although you cannot put doors in so that they are separated from each other.
We need to start building our houses recognising that household sizes will change and people would like to age in place. We can have a house that is a big house for a family that can then morph into a house that would fit, say, two smaller households or maybe one very small household and one medium-sized household. This could also include more use of relocatable houses or modular houses. Households do not stay the same.
In this vein, one of the more positive things in draft territory plan variation 306, which is still wending its way through the system, is the concept of secondary dwellings. They were what were called habitable suites or granny flats in the past. Variation 306, if passed, will make them a lot more adaptable. They will not have to be occupied by an aged or disabled relative, and they will not have to be got rid of when the aged or disabled relative is no longer resident at the location. That will be a very positive step forward, particularly in older suburbs where there are large blocks. We will probably quite often have a situation where the existing householder will move into a small, new, low-maintenance secondary dwelling and maybe have the younger generation in the larger building, what was the family house.
Other building innovations we should be looking at in Canberra include building things just as big as we need them—or as small as we need them, the other way of putting it. I would like to draw members’ attention to Ursula Hall at ANU. At Ursula Hall they have built a whole residence out of shipping container sized dwellings. Actually, the dwellings are all in shipping containers. They are fabricated, I think, in China; I do not swear to that. But they were all fabricated off-site and simply put into place with a crane. Then there was a verandah put out the front and the back, so everyone has their little balcony and on the other side there is a corridor connecting it up. That has been a very low cost method of accommodation. And because Ursula Hall also has nice common areas, it has worked, I understand, very well socially.
This sort of thing can be done not just for uni students. We can have smaller dwellings with good communal facilities that are going to be great places socially to live and great places economically to live—that should be cheaper to build and good places environmentally to build.
We really need to do work on low income households and their stress in Canberra, and there are some innovative solutions.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (5.22): I am grateful for the opportunity to be speaking about a very important topic, and certainly the issues around housing stress and financial stresses placed on families are very important. So
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