Page 2665 - Week 09 - Thursday, 9 August 1990
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90 budget. The first two were the introduction of a singles share accommodation scheme to allocate dwellings to community organisations for rental to young people and to allow the ACT Housing Trust to let dwellings directly to groups of young people; and the provision of capital grants of up to $2,000 per dwelling to community organisations sponsoring head tenancy arrangements under the scheme, to assist with the cost of whitegoods, furniture and fittings. Here I would like to thank again people such as FM104.7, the Belconnen Rotary Club and the Church of England who came to the aid by taking a head tenancy in two houses in Canberra, one for young men and one for young women. I commend them on the wonderful work they did. I feel that if you work hand in hand with the community it will solve a lot of problems, particularly with finance.
Another initiative was the employment of a youth housing officer in the ACT Housing Trust to be responsible for advising and assisting young tenants. This is terribly important. There was also the development of an ongoing training program for ACT Housing Trust staff on the needs of young and single people. Again, this is important because in many cases the Housing Trust staff in past years have not had this problem. Therefore, they need training in this field and need help.
Other initiatives were the development of information packages to promote the availability of existing and proposed ACT Government housing services for young people, and a review of the priority housing procedures of the ACT Housing Trust to ensure no unintended discrimination on the basis of age. This is another thing that very much needs to be looked at for young people.
There was also an examination of the role and usage of boarding houses to assist young people to move on to more independent forms of housing. This is needed when people need to move out. When they get their legs to stand up and they feel strong enough, they need to be able to move on to different types of housing. The final initiative was to allow tenants aged 16 and over to arrange for bond and rental assistance subsidies to be paid directly to agents or landlords.
Mr Acting Speaker, these major initiatives were outlined in our Government's response to Burdekin. What does this Government have to say on this subject? It simply takes credit for our initiatives. On page 7 of part 2 of its response it says:
... the ACT Alliance Government is now implementing the following set of youth housing initiatives.
It goes on to list exactly the same initiatives I have already mentioned. Not an original thought. While a bipartisan approach may be a good idea, the Government could at least give credit where credit is due. But, Mr
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