Page 2052 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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There are many areas where Canberra’s approach to housing needs to be improved, in my opinion. I list a lot of them in 2(d) of the motion, but I will particularly talk about three of them. The first is infill. If we want Canberra to become a more compact city, we need to have infill. But at present infill is a minefield. The planning rules for infill are often detailed and inflexible, and many years old. This means that they are blocking as much good development as bad development. However, it is very hard to change these rules, because communities have often been burnt by bad infill. The last thing communities want is looser rules, because of this. And yet I hear again and again from our community that they would support infill development if only it were better quality. To break this impasse, my motion requires that at least one of the demonstration precincts focus specifically on improved medium-density infill.
The second is housing products and typologies. Research by organisations like the Grattan Institute shows that the housing market does not always provide the housing we as a community want. Instead it provides the housing that buyers of new homes want, and they of course are only a small part of the community. For many years in Canberra, in particular, infill was dominated by one-bedroom apartments. This was not because that was where most people wanted to live, necessarily. It was because investors wanted to buy one-bedroom apartments to rent them out because this was the easiest way, arguably, to access tax concessions on investment properties, and thus financially the better deal.
The third issue is housing affordability. Clearly Canberra has an issue with housing affordability. We just debated public housing provision this morning and we did so also in the last sitting period. We have the second-highest rate of homelessness in Australia. In today’s Canberra Times we had Families ACT executive officer, Will Mollison, saying that some women would spend winter sleeping in cars to escape domestic violence.
There have been many suggestions for solving the housing problem, and I suspect the solution will have many facets, but a housing demonstration precinct could showcase some of the possible solutions. Many people have suggested to me “tiny houses” as a solution. I am not really sure they are a long-term solution but certainly a more flexible approach to housing sizes could be part of a solution. I have also had a number of suggestions of more innovative ownership models. These include housing co-ops, co-housing, shared equity and long-term rental models.
Given that we now have a significant number of long-term tenants, we need to look at this. These people want better tenure than a month by month lease. Long leases, say five years, are common in some countries overseas. They give the tenant a feeling of security that they can stay in their home, and this means they can invest in improvements around the home that they will never do on a short lease. They can plant a garden, which is a wonderful asset.
In conclusion, I want to make two points to emphasise why this motion should be supported. Firstly I reiterate the point I made earlier about industry support. This motion is not a thought bubble I came up with one night last week. The motion is
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