Page 2695 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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The maintenance contract for public housing is one of the territory’s largest ongoing contracts, and the Auditor-General raised serious concerns about the management and oversight of that contract. It will be good to see a lot of improvement in those areas. We also hear concerns from subcontractors contracted by Spotless who are concerned about the way things are managed on occasion. If the Auditor-General’s report into the maintenance of public housing is anything to go by, a lot of work obviously needs to be done in this area.
A lot of money is being spent on renewal of our public housing stock. Of course, the point we have made over and over again is that it is not a voluntary attempt to renew our public housing stock; it started off as a plan for light rail and the government has tried to rebadge it into urban renewal, It is quite transparent in the examples we have seen that it is only about the light rail. In one example flats along Northbourne Avenue that are about 50 years old are being emptied out and the ACT government has purchased flats about 50 years old from the ANU which have been kept in much better condition than the ACT public housing units that tenants are being moved from. So it is actually about maintaining the stock we have. Unfortunately for those properties on Northbourne Avenue, it is too late. They have been rundown to such a state that it is not possible and not fair to leave people in them.
The public housing renewal program also led us to question the salt and pepper policy. Salt and peppering is a good policy; it aims to distribute public housing so that it does not create concentrations of disadvantage. Minister Berry said during estimates hearings:
… the salt and pepper policy is not really based on a principle of statistics or numbers on particular streets; it is more about breaking down big numbers of disadvantaged people living together and distributing them all across our city. There is no actual formula used in the salt and pepper principle to make sure that we give everybody a chance to live all across our community regardless of their income, regardless of the postcode.
It raises some questions about what, if anything, the government takes into account when allocating the location of new public housing properties. At present it seems to me just a process of finding any available land. One example with the salt and peppering approach in mind is some new public housing located in Chisholm. We have spoken before about creating transport disadvantage and locating new public housing that is not close to shops and other facilities. In addition, in Chisholm it seems to go against some of the salt and peppering principles because Chisholm was one of the top suburbs named in the dropping off the edge report as experiencing concentrations of disadvantage. The government has been putting additional public housing in to Chisholm. To my mind that is not following a salt and pepper approach; that is creating more areas of disadvantage, and it is because they are in such a rush to empty out the Northbourne Avenue corridor for their light rail program.
On 1 July this year OneLink started to replace FirstPoint, the central information and access point for human services in the ACT. So OneLink is a partnership between Woden and Belconnen community services, and it aims to link people with services including housing, disability and family support services. Obviously OneLink is in its
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