Page 1575 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 May 1990
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prepared each year to provide information on a whole range of issues. They include the aims and principles; an overview of the local housing situation; an indication of housing needs in the community; planning processes to be adopted to meet those needs; resources available; priorities that are going to be pursued; outputs expected and targets agreed upon; the monitoring processes to be employed to ensure that assistance is going to those who genuinely and really do need it; and future directions.
Under the new agreement a joint officers group, comprising officers from the Commonwealth and the State or Territory housing authority, has responsibility for the development of that plan. The joint officers group is responsible for developing the framework for the plan and recommending the plan to Ministers. The joint officers group is also responsible for consulting with organisations relevant to the delivery of public housing assistance in relation to the development of the Commonwealth-State plan.
I understand that this planning process is well advanced in the ACT and I congratulate the Minister for that. Consultations have already been held with a wide variety of community representatives. The feedback that I am getting from community groups is that consultation is in place and is progressing very well. Once again, I congratulate the Minister for that.
In concluding, I would like to re-emphasise the primary principle of the Commonwealth-State housing agreement, which is to ensure that every person has access to secure, adequate and appropriate housing at a price within his or her capacity to pay, by seeking, firstly, to alleviate housing related poverty and, secondly, to ensure that housing assistance is as far as possible delivered equitably to persons resident in different forms of housing tenure.
I have no doubt that our membership of the Commonwealth-State housing agreement will have considerable long-lasting benefits for the ACT community. I endorse the Bill wholeheartedly as those principles that I have enunciated represent the very principles that this Government is acting upon and will always act upon, contrary to the catcalls from the other side of the house. Mr Speaker, I endorse the Bill.
MR COLLAERY (Minister for Housing and Community Services) (11.12), in reply: Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank Mrs Grassby for the endorsement she gave to the Bill. I do not suppose she had much choice in that regard. I do not thank her for her churlish comments about the fact that we were claiming the credit for things that she had done. If she had cared to be at Kaleen recently when I opened the Careforce house, or if she had been present the weekend before when I gave another house to the Anglican Careforce Group at Macquarie, she would have heard me say, at both of those, that the credit and the initiative for these matters lay with Mrs Ellnor Grassby. I said that to the gathering.
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