Page 5562 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2011
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We are going to see increased demand for social housing in the ACT when we have property prices the way they are. We have a tax on units going up to $50,000 and we have the land prices that we are seeing in Molonglo and Gungahlin. We have delays in planning and all the other restrictions and burdens that are put on the property sector in the ACT. It is no wonder that people cannot even get into the rental market, let alone the homeownership market. They are therefore forced to go into the social housing market.
There are many great providers of social housing in Australia, and we are very privileged to have a number here in the ACT. I have spoken in this place before about the very good work that Havelock Housing do; let me reiterate that I think they do a superb job. It would be appropriate for this government to look into ways that they can be engaged more and to discuss with them what support they need to grow into being a bigger housing provider here in the ACT.
One of the issues that I thought we would be discussing in some detail—maybe the minister will be doing so later if she does address this MPI—is the redevelopment of Northbourne Avenue. She may have reserved that issue because she thought it was a good juicy one and a good exciting announcement for her to make. However, we have to have a good think about the merits of the whole proposal. It is not to say that I am against it, but we really have to think about whether knocking down existing multi-unit dwellings and replacing them with, in effect, Housing ACT constructed dwellings is the right thing to do.
The designs look very good and I have had a look at the winning concept, the design “Weave”. It looks very impressive in the artist’s impressions that you see on the website. But we need to look at the philosophy underpinning that style of housing and whether that is appropriate. It may well be that this Assembly or the community decides that it is, but I do not think we have necessarily had that debate, because the government are in a position where they are unwilling to make tough decisions on social housing. As I said, we have a policy-free zone; we have more of the same. We are knocking down multi-unit dwellings to replace them with multi-unit dwellings. We have to ask whether that is necessarily going to be the best use of taxpayers’ money. It may well be that it will not cost taxpayers very much, because of private investment if it is a mixed housing arrangement. However, there is still an opportunity cost, and that is something that we should be exploring further.
Let me give the Assembly an understanding of what I mean in terms of some of the problems with social housing, especially with multi-unit dwellings. Very early in this term I had a telephone call from a very distressed 19-year-old girl. She called from a public house she was living in in Belconnen. She had an ex-partner who had burnt out her car a couple of times. Her partner somehow had a set of keys and was letting himself in. The windows were regularly getting broken; the house was getting graffiti-ed. It was absolutely diabolical. She called up, and she was in tears as she was telling me the situation. She said: “I’m having trouble getting through to Housing ACT. Can you help me?” I happily did that. Then she said to me, “However, I don’t want to go to one of those multi-unit housing blocks on Northbourne, or in the city or Red Hill, because they are much worse.” Here we had a situation where this poor teenager was living in horrific circumstances, yet she knows that it can be even worse, here in our city.
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