Page 1035 - Week 04 - Thursday, 1 April 1993
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Following the adoption of a process which mirrors that in the private rental market, the ACT Housing Trust is unable to proceed with regard to the eviction of tenants for non-payment of their rent before appeals can be heard by the Housing Review Committee. Again, this is a fair process, the equivalent of which is available to tenants renting in the private sector.
The ACT Housing Trust has acknowledged that difficulties exist regarding the payment of vacated arrears - the rental money that is owed to the ACT Housing Trust when tenants have vacated their property suddenly and unexpectedly. The possibility of the ACT Housing Trust writing off some of its outstanding debt in vacated arrears was explored during the estimates process last year. The trust has explored the options pursued in other States and is currently examining a system of debt collection for vacated arrears. Because State and Territory housing authorities will not accept interstate tenants who have housing arrears in other jurisdictions, there is some reluctance by the trust to actively pursue a write-off policy. The balance needs to be found between appropriate write-offs for non-payment of vacated arrears and the prevention of irresponsible tenants signing up for public housing in other jurisdictions. I have taken a long time to explicitly say that the ACT Housing Trust is effectively and appropriately pursuing the non-payment of rental arrears by trust tenants.
I would now like to move on to consideration of maintenance issues. Mr Cornwell has drawn attention to an ACT Housing Trust maintenance bill which totals 50 per cent of trust income. As the Minister has pointed out in his response to Mr Cornwell's concerns, the most appropriate comparison for assessment of the extent and cost of maintenance is with asset value. Therefore, maintenance expenditure of $20m is compared with the asset value of the trust, which is $1.1 billion. Thus, the percentage of maintenance work in relation to asset value is 1.87 per cent. This level of repair and maintenance compares favourably with maintenance expenditures by other housing authorities in Australia - New South Wales, 1.28 per cent; Victoria, 1.58 per cent; the Northern Territory, 1.6 per cent; Queensland, 1.79 per cent; the ACT, 1.87 per cent; Western Australia, 2.39 per cent; Tasmania, 2.58 per cent; and South Australia, 3.04 per cent.
The ACT Housing Trust has four maintenance programs. The first is urgent maintenance and minor repairs, including tenant requests for these repairs. These are ad hoc requests for maintenance over which the trust has little or no control, and these have totalled $9.7m. The second area of maintenance is cyclical maintenance, which includes regular upgrades of public housing stock, for example, by way of painting. As opposed to urgent maintenance and minor repairs, cyclical maintenance can be planned for and budgeted for, and it has totalled $5m. The third is the vacancy maintenance program. This is where maintenance upgrades occur when Housing Trust properties are vacated. These are difficult to plan for and relate to the turnover of trust properties. The fourth is the refurbishment and replacement maintenance policy. These upgrades can also be linked with the vacancy maintenance program. However, the refurbishment and replacement program takes a longer-term view of the maintenance of public housing stock and generally occurs 50 years following the establishment of public housing. As the bulk of the ACT's public housing stock was built between the 1950s and the 1970s, major upgrades of public housing will need to occur at the turn of the century and be maintained until the year 2020.
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