Page 485 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 1993
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (10.46): Madam Speaker, the tirade we have just heard represents yet again the Liberal Party's ideological obsession with destroying public housing. On repeated occasions in this place we have heard Mr De Domenico and Mr Westende saying that a budget solution for the ACT would be to flog off our public housing and get our level of public housing, which is 12 per cent of the housing stock in the ACT, down to the level of about 5 per cent, which is what it is in New South Wales. So there are two Liberals who have said in the chamber that we should be flogging off half our public housing. Mr De Domenico is enthusiastically nodding. They want to flog off our public housing.
Last year Mr Cornwell was ranting and raving against a women's shelter which he was disparagingly referring to as a "Club Med". There is a sort of hatred of provisions for people who are disadvantaged and in crisis - you just ridicule them; you try to pretend to the community that they are living in some sort of luxurious palace. It is an extreme, right-wing, ideologically driven opposition to public housing. "Flog it off", say two of them. Marginalise it out in the suburbs, the fringes of Canberra. Do in the ACT what Liberal governments did in the 1960s in New South Wales and Victoria - build Housing Trust ghettos and get rid of all the Housing Trust stock in the inner city areas.
One of the great things about public housing in this Territory is that it is spread throughout every suburb of Canberra. There is not a suburb in Canberra that does not have a Housing Trust house in it. There was a developer in Gungahlin that was advertising on the basis that it did not have any public housing, and I made sure that we went and bought a block. We will ensure that there is public housing scattered throughout Canberra. We do not take the approach that Dr Hewson took, namely, "You can tell the renters because they are living in ragged houses". That is Dr Hewson's approach; that is the Liberal Party's approach - flog off public housing.
Mr Cornwell: On a point of order, Madam Speaker: Relevance to the matter before the Assembly.
MR CONNOLLY: The relevance here is that I am saying that Labor believes in integrating housing; you people believe in marginalising it.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! If we had a bit of order, it might make it easier to follow the logic of all this.
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, the most extraordinary new proposition that came up today - there were not too many new ones, but there was one - is one which is going to cause Mr Humphries great embarrassment. Mr Humphries is wont to parade around the Territory being the champion of prisoners' rights and generally attacking the Government for being hard and uncaring and not doing the right thing for prisoners. Mr Cornwell has a proposition that if you have ever been to prison you have a tattoo on your forehead, "This person was convicted for an offence, so he cannot be moved into a Housing Trust house".
Mr Kaine: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. What the Minister is saying is a gross distortion of the member's view on this matter, and I suspect that he should withdraw it and stick to the facts.
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