Page 4456 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
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find that the businesses in that area are suffering tremendously. Unfortunately, small grocery businesses, takeaways and chemist shops rely on large housing areas, such as the Melba Flats, although there were 100 flats empty at any time there. As I am being told from time to time by phone calls, the business section in that area is slowly going bankrupt.
I ask the Minister here today: can any date be given for when people will be moving back into that area? I sympathise with the fact that it is a large job that is to be done, but we need a time. We still seem not to have moved quite a few people out of this area to go ahead with it.
The other thing about which I would like to speak later is some of the money from the CHA, but I will allow other speakers, at the moment, to speak on other things.
MR MOORE (10.52): I will make some comments on the shared ownership proposal as it fits into this part of the Appropriation Bill. I think the most significant comment is that the proposal fails to meet its first stated objective; but, most importantly, the scheme is adversely targeted at those better-off tenants rather than those who could genuinely benefit from a shared ownership scheme.
In other words, full home purchase assistance should be extended as far as possible down the income scale by using indexed mortgages for the Commissioner for Housing loan scheme, and those eligible for such unsubsidised assistance should be excluded from the shared ownership scheme. Encouraging the slightly better-off tenants out of public rental housing just because the waiting list is long is, in the longer term, a false economy because those paying more than the cost of recovery rental are helping to subsidise those on rental rebates.
Given the high rate of admittance of those on pensions and benefits into public rental housing - I believe we can expect an even greater admittance over the next little while, considering the state of the economy in Federal terms - there is a desperate need to retain those who can afford to pay full market rents to maintain the longer-term viability of public rental housing. The longer-term consequences of this scheme will be the need to inject larger sums of ACT funds into public rental housing to maintain its viability.
I think there are questions to be raised about the scheme which is still open for discussion. I thought it would be appropriate to raise those issues in this context. I am aware, thanks to the approach of the Minister, that we will have further opportunities to discuss this in more detail because the decision is not yet final, but I thought it was worth raising at this point.
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