Page 970 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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(c) allocate sufficient funds to have all significant maintenance requests including for health and safety defects resolved no later than 31 August 2021;
(d) ensure the provisions and performance benchmarks in the facilities maintenance contract for public housing are enforced; and
(e) report back to this Assembly before mid-October on progress made in resolving maintenance backlog impacting on tenants’ health and safety.
As the shadow minister for housing in the ACT, it is very clear from a quick read of my email inbox that things are crook in Tallarook. I genuinely regret that I have to bring a motion like this to the chamber; I do not think that should be the case. At its core this motion is about basic human rights; at its core this is about giving families and individuals the ability to live their lives in dwellings that do not threaten their health and safety.
When you think about it that way, it is amazing that we are even debating it. I am bringing on this motion because some public housing tenants are being ignored or neglected well beyond reasonable standards. I understand that Housing ACT’s maintenance contactor has around 12,000 properties to look after in addition to being responsible for the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre and the long stay park at Symonston. It is a big job.
In announcing the new contract with Programmed, the minister reflected on the extensive consultations that led to this contract, which included talking to tenants, industry and community housing organisations. The minister was getting a steady stream of representations from me and no doubt from other MLAs also, and I am sure the minister had a pretty good picture of what was working and what was not working.
When the minister announced the new public housing maintenance contract in July of 2018, I was certainly full of hope that the rate of complaints that I would receive about neglect of maintenance in public housing would dry up. But they have not. In recent times some quite worrying instances have been brought to my attention, and I will highlight some of the examples shortly.
This motion is not complex by any means. It contains pretty much one simple request of government and one simple message only—that is, to inform itself of the extent to which public housing tenants are living in unacceptable conditions and to get those properties fixed as a matter of urgency. How could anyone possibly argue with that? The government portrays itself as a compassionate government, a government sensitive to the needs of a diversity of cultures and a government that cares for people in varying economic and social circumstances. It is a government that takes forensic interests in the rights, powers, and discretion of landlords in the private sector in the interests of what it sees as a fair go for tenants, and in this regard over the last few years there has been a raft of legislative amendments to expand tenant rights and restrict the discretion of landlords.
But when it comes to this government’s stewardship in its role as a landlord itself, all of a sudden those lofty standards it expects private landlords to uphold do not seem to
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