Page 1191 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 24 June 1992
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urban sprawls - all those sorts of factors - have to affect the way in which States and the Commonwealth do make arrangements for public housing. That is why I say that it may be, in the course of time, that different agreements or radically modified Commonwealth-State Housing Agreements have to be considered; but the question of an agreement in itself, I think, is not negotiable.
Mr Moore opposes the idea of untying grants to the States.
Mr Moore: In this case, with reference to housing.
MR HUMPHRIES: He says that we should not be untying housing grants to the States. Those housing grants are pretty large and you can well understand why the Commonwealth would be looking to untie them. There was something like $960m in the 1990-91 financial year committed to the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement by the Commonwealth, and that, of course, is matched by the States; so it is a quite large sum of money that we are talking about.
I have to indicate that I think it is curious of Mr Moore to take that kind of approach. He seems to feel that the Commonwealth is more likely to be consistent in its responsibilities towards public housing than are the State governments, even though the Commonwealth has no public housing tenants of its own that I am aware of. It is entirely the States and the Territories who have those tenants and who have to deal with the day-to-day problems that arise from management of that kind of housing stock.
Mr Moore, in the same breath, says and acknowledges that it is the Commonwealth which at present is posing the biggest threat to the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement. I have to say that if we felt it appropriate that there should be some arrangement in place which did not coincide with the Commonwealth's views about it, I would think that we should make our own arrangements, and that might not rely on any tied Commonwealth funding. It might be based on other Commonwealth grants which we, as a Territory, devote to public housing, and that should be our decision. From my point of view, it is regrettable that Mr Moore closes his mind off to a different way of delivering effective public housing.
Mr Moore: I never have a closed mind.
MR HUMPHRIES: You have said already, Mr Moore, that the Government has to keep a strong mix of welfare and non-welfare or rebatable and non-rebatable housing in order to be able to guarantee a certain balance as between the two sectors. I think the arguments you used were, in effect, that by having non-welfare housing you camouflage the welfare housing out in the communities; that if someone is a tenant of the Housing Commission or whatever, or the Housing Trust in the ACT, you cannot be sure that they are actually poor because they might be a non-rebatable tenant or something of that kind. There was also the argument that non-rebatable or non-welfare tenants were subsiding the welfare tenants. I have to say, Madam Speaker, that that kind of experience is not borne out by experiments elsewhere in public housing.
I think there is room for a number of developments in this field. I think, for example, that there is room for the private sector to be much more heavily involved in the delivery of public housing. That might sound like a contradiction in terms and something that Mr Moore finds very hard to accept, but I point him to the New South Wales Government's experiment with the AMP scheme that it
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