Page 1860 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 1 May 1991
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MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General and Minister for Housing and Community Services) (4.08): I thank Mr Wood for his measured comments, because I thought that was the better contribution from the Labor Party. Mr Wood, of course, has read volumes 1, 2 and 3 of this excellent publication that the Housing Ministers Conference gave support to. It is by Dr Meredith Edwards of the National Housing Strategy.
As an introduction to my comments, I will draw the conclusions reached on page 21 of background paper 1 to the attention of the house. It states:
There have been incremental and fragmented developments in Australian housing policies over the past few decades.
It goes on to state that one of the great challenges is:
... to develop an agenda of fundamental policy reform to match the dramatic changes in demographic, economic and social environments.
And again, in issues paper 2, at page 45, the study indicates, on rental housing supply, that in Melbourne, Darwin and Hobart there has been a decrease in the number of rental properties and "despite national vacancy rates of around 3 per cent and moderate rates of rent increases over the whole of this period, the availability of low to moderately priced accommodation has generally declined". So, that is a national trend.
Last year, our Alliance Government committed itself to introducing a private rental trust during the current year, and that was a rental trust to tackle the lower end of the market, if I can say that - the people on lower incomes. We believed that the Commonwealth had committed itself to giving us matched or agreed funding on that. It has deferred its commitment. Therefore we find that we cannot rely on the Commonwealth to pursue the introduction of a private rental trust arrangement. Nevertheless, we will pursue the introduction of one, and we are looking at a scheme that over the next five years may assist us to provide, out there on the private rental market, an additional 400 rental properties. We are currently looking at that and we are looking at off-budget loan capacities to do that. That is exciting work that the new Commissioner for Housing, Rod Templar, is undertaking for me at this stage.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I refute that we are in any housing crisis. When we took over the government from Labor, the waiting list in the public housing sector was 3,261 in November 1989, and at 30 April 1991 it stands at 3,483. This increase of about 200 registrants could hardly be seen as a blow-out, if you accept the fluctuations that exist on that list. The average waiting time in the ACT is less than three years, and this compares favourably with the other
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