Page 3189 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019

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Housing ACT—Part 1.11

MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (4.02): Mr Assistant Speaker, I note your absence from this debate on housing right now; hopefully, you will be joining us shortly.

I intend to speak about the EPSDD and the CSD components at the same time. The key budget measures for housing include $20 million per year over the forward estimates for new public housing stock, $7.2 million for the justice housing initiatives and continued work on planning—I do not know about construction yet—of a new Common Ground facility in Dickson.

There are a number of other things which do not involve a lot of money but are nonetheless important, such as the energy efficiency improvement scheme, which will continue to be rolled out in public housing. Funding for supported accommodation for people with mental illness, otherwise known as the my home project, has been carried over from the last financial year into this year. I sincerely hope that there are no further delays on this really exciting project.

Also welcome is the introduction of a 25 per cent lease variation charge remission for registered community housing providers, commencing on 1 October 2019, to encourage the development of more affordable rental housing. The budgeted cost of this is $200,000 for the first three years, but, curiously, there is a zero cost in 2022-23. 

It is very welcome that the government is investing $100 million over the next five years to build 200 new public housing dwellings, or 40 a year. However, to maintain our current proportion of social housing, we need to add about one new dwelling a day to our stock, so this is a long way off what is required. I acknowledge that that investment would be difficult for the ACT government alone. There has been a sustained failure across successive commonwealth governments for the past 25 years or so to adequately fund social housing construction, with the notable but brief exception of the one-off social housing component of the nation-building economic stimulus plan, which saw $87 million spent on social housing in the ACT from 2009.

Also welcome is the $7.2 million in capital funding for new justice housing. Again this is another program where operational funding stops, this time in 2021-22. I would imagine that if this program is successful, it should be expanded, or at the very least continued; so I do not really know what is going on. The indicative land release program for 2019-20 is made up of 3,440 dwelling sites. Of these, 48 are affordable for sale, 80 are for public housing and 60 are for community housing, which makes a total of 628 dwelling sites. The percentage of affordable for sale, public and community housing, therefore, is 18.3 per cent, which is commendable.

We learnt a few interesting titbits from budget estimates, in particular from questions taken on notice. We have learnt, for instance, that the government’s revamped and easier to access bond loans scheme is being used by many more renters than previously, which is good. The new digital platform does not collect data on the gender of the applicants, even though the paper one, which is still in use, does.


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