Page 1188 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 24 June 1992
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Madam Speaker, I would commend to the Liberal Party a book that I have referred to in this Assembly before by Hugh Stretton. Mr Moore is very familiar with this. Hugh Stretton was a professor of history and philosophy. I do not know whether he was ever a member of the Australian Labor Party, but he certainly always described himself as a dedicated democratic socialist. The hero of this book in relation to public housing is Tom Playford, the longest serving, ever, Liberal Premier in Australia.
Mr De Domenico: A great Australian.
MR CONNOLLY: A great Australian, Mr De Domenico. I would be the first to say that. He established through the South Australian Housing Trust models for public housing that I wish this current Liberal Party would be prepared to embrace. It is that model of public housing - not as housing of last resort, but housing integrated throughout the community - the model of social integration, of blending public housing in with other housing, established in South Australia through the Housing Trust and endorsed extraordinarily well in this city over successive administrations, Labor and Liberal, that Stretton argues provides positive social justice for the Australian community.
He contrasts that style of public housing with some of the more unfortunate efforts of State governments of varying political persuasions, in particular Victoria and New South Wales, to establish some of the public housing ghettos of, particularly, the 1960s - large blocks of public housing. It really concerned me to get that sort of mentality creeping back in some of the comments from the Liberal Party in recent weeks; this suggestion that we should be flogging off inner city properties and concentrating on cheap housing on the margins of the city.
I would commend to all members - this document has certainly been circulated to them, but further copies are available from my office - the Housing Trust draft discussion paper on a stock management strategy which was distributed in May of this year. In particular, a paper at the back, attachment 4, refers to a social mix policy for public housing. That document sets out very clearly the thinking of the Housing Trust and the thinking of the Government on this issue of social mix. We see it as crucial that public housing be diversified throughout the community; that no suburb have no public housing in it and that no suburb have an overconcentration of public housing.
I was very concerned at some of the suggestions that I heard the other week about an automatic right to sell government housing, giving the Government no control over its stock. We have a conscious policy of allowing and, indeed, encouraging people to purchase their government house if they have been in there for a period, and I will not enter into that five-year or 10-year debate. We are happy about a stock management strategy involving some sales and some repurchase of government housing, but we will always reserve our right to refuse to sell a house if we want to use it for other purposes in a suburb.
Pursuant to the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement we have been able to significantly expand the public housing starts program in the ACT in the last budget. Members would be aware that that involved some 243 commencements of new public housing in the Territory. That created many hundreds of jobs. Fifty-seven of those were house-land packages that we bought off the private sector, thus providing stimulus to the private housing industry at a time late last year when it was in decline. At the moment things are motoring along quite well in that sector and I think our assistance played some part in that.
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