Page 1973 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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essential for health and social equity. The ACT has the second highest rate of homelessness in Australia. There is absolutely no question, I would have thought, that Canberra needs more affordable and public housing.
Clearly, there is more than one value here. There is the value of open provision of government information. There is also the value of our government operating effectively, and operating effectively in the provision of public housing. I think what we are seeing here is two values colliding, and decisions have been made.
Mr Parton’s paragraph (3)(a) reads:
provide this Assembly with details of all community facilities zoned land that is being considered for, or has been earmarked for development of public housing, by the end of this sitting week;
I absolutely understand why people would feel they want that. If you are living somewhere that happens to be near community facilities zoned land, you want to know what is happening in your neighbourhood. It is a request that people could reasonably make. But I also understand why the government is simply not in a position to give this information. I would assume that at some time over the long history of Housing ACT it has considered virtually all of Canberra—except, I would assume, the Namadgi national park—as a possible site at some stage for public housing.
Remember that most of Canberra’s housing was originally public housing. So to ask about areas that have been considered as possible sites for public housing is an absolutely huge ask. I really do not think it is a practical or useful ask given that it would have to encompass an awful lot of Canberra. Okay, the lakes are out; I do not think we have looked at boat sites. But most of Canberra, of course, would have been looked at and deemed unsuitable. I have been told, in fact, that Housing ACT has one staff member whose full-time job it is to look at the allhomes website for possible options for public housing. I know that Housing ACT are taking the vision of public housing seriously and they are looking at reasonable options. And that is the job that we expect them to do. We expect them to do this effectively. We do not expect them to, each day, provide a list of websites they have looked at. That is just ridiculous, basically. We need to have efficient and effective administration of public housing.
The issue also is that once the government has made the decision that “this is a live option”, as it were, it needs to properly communicate that to the community. I think that is the point. The question that we all need to debate and consider is how we ensure that that consultation happens about things that are real options, so that the community’s time and the government’s time are not wasted by mentioning every bureaucrat’s passing thought bubble. That will not help anybody. That will just overload people with—I was going to say information, but it is not even information; it is irrelevancies. It is just not relevant.
The bottom line is that Housing ACT has a program to provide 1,288 new homes, and the issue is where and how to replace them. An issue clearly is whether some or all of it, or any of it, should be built on community facilities zoned land. We have a limited
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