Page 1721 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 15 May 2019
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precincts in our city. And that is important. Canberra has more than 100 leafy suburbs. We have a handful of dense urban areas. That balance reflects our city’s growth path, our history.
Our future also needs to include diversity of housing types. That will mean that there will be some areas that are densely populated. They are the city centre, town centres and in and around group centres and major employment hubs. But our suburbs, which constitute about 70 per cent of all housing in the ACT, continue to be detached, single dwellings. That will be the dominant housing type in our city in most of our lifetimes.
There is demand for more dense living opportunities in the city, in our town centres and in and around group centres, in major employment centres and along transport corridors. Part of our work in supplying new housing for our growing population is to strike that balance. That is exactly what we are endeavouring to do. I commend my amendment to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (3.16): The Greens will not be supporting Mr Coe’s motion today. It is clearly a pre-federal election stunt, as Mr Barr also noted. The first item of his motion calls on the Assembly to note the importance of having a commonwealth government that is a good economic manager. That is a statement of the obvious and it is quite hard to argue with, so I will not bother.
The second item of Mr Coe’s motion calls on the Assembly to note the lack of affordable housing in Canberra. That is a topic I have devoted considerable time to in this chamber, as indeed have the ACT Greens and the Australian Greens in developing policies on this matter. The parliamentary agreement commits the government to a range of housing-related measures. These include the development of a housing strategy, the creation of a housing innovation fund and the expansion of homelessness services.
Since the beginning of last year the ACT Greens have tabled a successful motion calling on the ACT government to maintain the current proportion of social housing in the ACT; ensured that the indicative land release program includes information about the number of public, community and affordable housing dwellings planned for new release; introduced a successful motion to allow landlords to receive a discount on their land tax if they rent their property at a discount from market rent to lower and moderate income tenants, which has now been legislated into effect; worked with the government to ensure that the seniors rates deferral scheme is both more widely available and better advertised; and introduced a raft of amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act to improve renters’ rights.
Sadly, both Labor and the Liberal Party have voted against many of our housing-related motions and amendments. Most recently the ACT Greens developed a raft of amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act. I was saddened that neither the ALP nor the Liberals supported our amendments to remove no-cause eviction and to put in place some simple minimum standards for rental housing.
Mr Coe’s third note in his motion is a grab bag of issues, some of which relate to the ACT government’s policies and operations, and others to external entities, the banks. Really, this is just not worth going through today.
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