Page 5559 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2011
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Members interjecting—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Excuse me, Dr Bourke, for just a moment. Members, the level of conversation in the gallery is so loud that I cannot hear Dr Bourke. Can you keep it down, please?
DR BOURKE: It is also about providing services and support, about working with our community partners to assist the unemployed, disabled and disadvantaged in our community to break out of a cycle of poverty or homelessness. So it is extremely important that we as a government and community remain focused on social housing renewal.
As members of this place should be aware, most of the public housing in Canberra is drawn from housing that was constructed by the commonwealth to accommodate public servants transferring to Canberra in the 1950s to the early 1980s. This presents some challenges. Today, more than 50 per cent of our public housing stock in the ACT is over 30 years old. In addition to having the largest number of public housing properties in the country per capita, this figure means also that we have the oldest public housing portfolio in Australia and it does require high levels of repairs and maintenance.
There are other challenges. Over time, the accommodation requirements for people wanting public housing have changed. On the one hand, there has been a large increase in the demand for housing with four or more bedrooms. Meanwhile, there is still a very strong demand for properties with two or fewer bedrooms, which is in line with the forecast increase in single-person households. Recent data show that 53 per cent of applicants seek one or two bedrooms, with 26 per cent searching for three bedrooms and 20 per cent looking for four or more bedrooms.
To give some context, in terms of our existing stock, only 8.5 per cent are four or more bedrooms, 42.3 per cent are three bedrooms and 30.5 per cent are two bedrooms. Overall, the number of people wanting one or two and four-plus bedroom housing is growing, while the number of those seeking three bedroom housing is falling.
However, there are also some very positive elements to our housing stock. The presence of public housing spread right across the territory is one of these very positive features. Currently public housing accommodates and supports just over 23,000 people across the territory. Of the total housing stock, 64 per cent are houses, with 22 per cent being flats. Of the flats, 83 per cent are located in multi-unit properties.
This government does not shy away from providing public housing in the suburbs. It is a primary goal. And we know that this salt-and-pepper approach is vastly preferable to the outdated model of concentrating multi-unit properties in certain areas, a method that many describe as concentrations of disadvantage. We know there are better outcomes from integrating public housing into the suburbs, and the tenants know it too.
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