Page 2571 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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suited to the demographics of the people waiting for housing. The size of the waiting list remains, with many of those waiting on the priority or high-needs list. That means most of the people waiting to be housed are doing it tough, and it is almost impossible to prioritise who has the most urgent need for our limited supply of housing.
But the ACT government recently made a significant decision. Cabinet decided to endorse a range of recommendations to increase the amount of public housing that we have available for members of our community, to speed up the renewal process of our older properties and to maintain and expand the salt and pepper approach to public housing in existing and new suburbs.
Perhaps even more significantly, this whole-of-government approach signals an evolution in housing that has been taking place slowly over recent times—an understanding that when people seek public housing they do not do so simply because they lack accommodation; they do so for a raft of reasons, from temporary financial difficulty to long-term homelessness, from personal crises to difficulties with social inclusion. Our tenants are diverse, and their needs and the level of support they require are not homogeneous. A whole-of-government approach heralds the possibility of providing a more cohesive and integrated range of services to our tenants who need them.
What I can say unequivocally is that we need to grow our social housing stock and we need to be more responsive to the environmental and social needs of a modern housing portfolio. That means we must renew and redevelop our housing stock so that we can better support vulnerable members of our community. It means improving the quality of our housing—for instance, fulfilling our parliamentary agreement item to continue expanding public housing energy efficiency upgrades to reduce the environmental impact of heating and cooling those homes but also to make it more affordable for tenants. That is truly tackling one of those cost-of-living issues that I know public housing tenants face.
It does mean building new houses that are designed to meet the needs of tenants. Often that will mean smaller complexes of 10 to 15 units to reduce the risk of pockets of disadvantage forming and to promote more inclusive neighbourhoods. It also means changing our approach to managing tenants, which we have started by introducing a new management model for Housing ACT that adopts a more responsive, tiered approach to directing the time, resources and services provided by housing managers.
I was very pleased with this initiative, which Housing ACT put in place from the beginning of July, where those tenants who are struggling, who perhaps come to Housing’s attention because of issues of neighbourhood disputes and other problems, will receive more support. Those tenants that really need the support will get it, and those tenants who are perhaps just going along fine, who are paying their rent regularly and who Housing perhaps does not need to support nearly as much, will receive less contact from Housing ACT, with the ability for people to move along that spectrum as needed.
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