Page 1521 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2017
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The problem is that major changes were made on that question through two technical amendments. For many years the Territory Plan said that supportive housing, which is the technical definition that public housing may fall into, was allowed only in community facility land where it was restricted to “persons with special housing needs for reasons of age or disability”. Through two technical amendments, in 2014 and 2015, this was changed to “persons in need of support” and then “social housing” was added to the definition of supportive housing.
These changes may well have been a good idea that, after debate, the community mostly supported; or they may get the balance wrong and we will end up without any community land available for broader community use. The point is that whichever side of the debate you would have been on, had the debate happened, you did not get a say because these were only technical amendments with limited consultation. Limited, in this case, effectively meant none.
Now, of course, this is coming back to bite the government, because to many people in the community it looks like this was sneaking through a substantial change because the government was running a housing renewal program. I should say again that we strongly support the housing renewal program. We are not anti that. I also note that most of the housing renewal has not been done, to the best of my knowledge, on community facility zoned land. We are not in any way trying to say that we are anti public housing. We are very strong supporters of the public housing renewal program. In fact, it was Mr Rattenbury as housing minister who, I believe, got the government commitment for a one-for-one replacement of dwellings as part of this program.
But we could have had an open and transparent debate in which the government explained how important public housing renewal is; it is, of course, really important. It could have openly discussed the challenges of finding enough land and the community could have helped find a solution. Instead, we get bitterness and anger, with public housing tenants and people like me, who support public housing, stuck in the middle of a debate. That should not be about how the Territory Plan is varied. That really should not be the substance of a debate about public housing.
My second example is in Dickson. It involves three substantial strips of community facility zone land in the Dickson shopping centre, right next to the library, health centre and the Baptist Church. Technical amendments were used to convert this land to a commercial zone.
On the one hand you could see these re-zonings as “tidying up” of the zoning of government-owned car parks, which arguably are not community facilities. On the other hand, as a number of Dickson locals do—and I can see their point on this—you could see these changes as an inappropriate loss of a large area of land which could have been used to expand existing or new community facilities. Once the land is gone from the community facilities land supply it is almost certainly gone forever.
To me, and to many people, this is a debate worth having. There should have been a community discussion. Maybe it would have come down on the side of rezoning, or
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