Page 1853 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 1 May 1991
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Mr Speaker, in June 1990 the public housing waiting list stood at 3,034 households. In the six-month period to January 1991 that list had grown by 34.2 per cent, that is, 4,071 households or over 10,000 people were looking to call on the Housing Trust to assist them with their accommodation. Of course, the Housing Trust cannot keep pace with that kind of demand. Last year its construction activity added 150 dwellings to the public housing stock, and I believe that the increase for 1991 will be of about the same order.
It also, of course, has a spot purchase arrangement for housing in the ACT, but the purchases in the past year have actually numbered less than 100. So, there have been about 250 dwellings added to the Housing Trust stock, and you have to put that figure against those 10,000 people waiting to be accommodated. Mr Speaker, I think that on any kind of a valuation we must see that that response is inadequate to meet the demand, and that the people who are waiting for that kind of accommodation can well be said to be in crisis. Mr Jensen has written them off totally.
As we know, the Government opposite - the Liberal Government opposite - has frequently spoken about selling off public housing. Indeed, the Priorities Review Board, the Alliance's bible, strongly urged the Government to engage in wholesale asset stripping of the public housing stock. Even if the sale of that stock went ahead and the proceeds were reinvested, the problem that you then encounter - and it is a problem indeed - is that the reinvestment most often takes place in the outer areas of the ACT, on the urban fringes where people find transport difficult, find employment difficult and find access to community services difficult. We must bear in mind that the people I am talking about are already the most disadvantaged in our community. They are not part of the 65 per cent that Mr Jensen addressed his remarks to, who are buying their own homes and presumably have assets and resources. These are the most disadvantaged people.
If we turn and look at the private rental market, I notice that Mr Jensen is quite relaxed about the situation there, and from his callousness it is quite obvious that he is not looking to rent accommodation. There is, indeed, a real crisis in rental accommodation, a real difficulty for people, firstly, to find accommodation and, secondly, to afford the skyrocketing prices for that accommodation. Vacancy rates in the private rental market in Canberra in March were approximately 0.8 per cent. That is a very low vacancy rate. Mr Jensen appears unaware of that. In November last year, I believe, the figure was about 2.2 per cent. So, you can see that just in that short period in the ACT there has been a massive contraction in rental vacancies. This means, of course, that people all have to compete. They are open to exploitation by landlords, and that is quite often the case.
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