Page 2608 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 October 1992
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Housing Trust Properties - Rents and Values
MR CORNWELL: My question is addressed to the Minister for Housing and concerns the Minister's recent public claim that the rents of non-rebatable Housing Trust tenants could not be brought into line with rents in the private sector because the Housing Trust properties were of poorer quality. Why does the Minister continue to claim, for example, in the 1992-93 annual report - we do not have any page numbers for this - that public housing rent levels are based on market rents? Further, in the publication Buying your ACT Government Home, which is a Housing Trust publication, it is stated:
The Housing Trust retains first option to buy back your property. Of course, this will be at the prevailing market value.
Does the Minister not agree that these quoted statements about market rents and values convey the impression that non-rebated Housing Trust properties' rents and values are the same rents and values as in the private market? If so, what does the Minister intend to do to correct this quite misleading impression, judging from his earlier comments?
MR CONNOLLY: "Misleading" is an apt word, because that is what this debate is all about. We did go through this at some length in the Estimates Committee. Mr Cornwell distinguished himself as a shadow spokesperson who actually attended the Estimates Committee throughout the period in which his shadow portfolio was being debated, and I commend him for that. A fine example he set to the rest of his colleagues.
The nub of this, as he said in the quote from the unpaged document - I am pleased that it is not only the Government that occasionally is unable to provide page references - is that rents for non-rebated houses are based on market valuations. We assess what an independent valuer assesses as a market rent for those properties. I did not say that the Housing Trust has poorer quality housing stock; I said that it is different housing stock.
It is quite misleading to compare the average price for private sector dwellings, which include the rental for three-bedroom Kingston special townhouses as well as ordinary private rental stock, with the average market rent that is charged by the Housing Trust. The Housing Trust properties are of a different standard from what you could call the market average. They do not have, generally speaking, twin bathrooms and all the extras; they are not all fully carpeted. They do not necessarily have all those features. That is not to say - and we have had this debate with Mr Cornwell before - that public housing should necessarily be low-quality housing. It is not. But it is housing of a different standard from the average available on the private market.
Our view, our policy, is that the Housing Trust rent should be a fair market rent. Rebated tenants then get an additional benefit and are getting truly subsidised housing; non-rebated tenants should be paying a market rent for that house. It is true that that average market rent is lower than the average market rent for private sector dwellings in the ACT, but that can be explained because of the difference in the housing stock.
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