Page 2597 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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In 1989 the house at Waramanga was made available to the Canberra City Lions Club - they are the lessee - and they were able to appoint a supervisor. They appointed Mrs Hamers as the supervisor. It appears that Mrs Hamers also moved her three adult children into that house and that they have been living in that house, in effect rent free, for the last two-and-a-half years. The Housing Trust was not aware that Mrs Hamers' adult children were there. Contrary to the report in the newspaper yesterday, the house was never Mrs Hamers' or the Hamers' family house. The house was always made available to the Canberra City Lions Club, which was financially supporting the drop-in centre, or the refuge, and was indeed supporting Mrs Hamers as supervisor.
Problems have arisen over the last 18 months or so. On various occasions there have been up to 17 people in residence. This house, it should be remembered, is an ordinary house in an ordinary residential area. There have been consistent complaints from the neighbours about the lack of adequate supervision and the large number of persons present in an ordinary suburban house in an ordinary suburban neighbourhood. As a result, there were discussions between the Canberra City Lions Club, who were the lessees and who were running the program, and the Housing Trust.
A new house in a different area has been identified. The conditions under which the Duffy house will operate will be somewhat stricter. In particular, there will be only five persons resident at any one time, apart from Mrs Hamers as supervisor. That does mean that Mrs Hamers' adult children - I understand that the youngest is 22 - will no longer have accommodation provided free of charge by the ACT taxpayer, but I am sure that that is a situation which Mr Kaine would acknowledge is hardly unreasonable.
The excellent concept of making available Housing Trust houses to community groups to provide facilities for homeless young people will continue. The supervision will be much easier with a smaller house and with tighter conditions on the number of persons there, and that is a situation which is satisfactory to both the Lions Club and the Housing Trust.
In my view, there has been no harshness here, no lack of social conscience. What has happened is that a project had got too big to be continued in an ordinary residential house in an ordinary residential suburb. To the extent that the Hamers family will no longer be able to reside there, that simply means that they will have to make arrangements, like anyone else, to find their own accommodation. It was never intended that the provision of a house to the Lions Club and the engagement of a supervisor would mean rent-free accommodation for the adult children of that supervisor.
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