Page 366 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 2 March 1994
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The reasons that I say that are twofold. First of all, somebody living in a Housing Trust house can buy it after eight years anyway. In saying, "We will not endorse the sale of this house after five years", all the Minister is saying is, "Whether you like or not, you are going to have to sit there another three years before we will entertain it".
Mr Connolly: When you introduced the scheme, it was 10 years.
MR KAINE: We introduced it at 10 years, and there was a logic behind that, Madam Speaker. We were concerned that there would be such a flood of applicants that if we opened it up for very limited tenancy we simply could not process the applications. Our intention always was to progressively reduce it from 10, and our target was always five. We introduced it at 10. Mr Connolly came on the scene, and it did not take him long to reduce it to eight. He saw that there was some logic in that, but he does not see any logic in reducing it further.
Let me make a point about declining to sell the house to somebody after a qualifying period of five years. Be02ar in mind that the financial circumstances of the tenant must improve over the five years or eight years to the point where they can afford to buy the house. If their financial circumstances change such that they are now in a position to buy and Mr Connolly says no, he immediately has a disgruntled tenant who would like to buy the house. He is in a position to buy it and Mr Connolly is saying, "No, we will not sell it to you; but, if you stick around for another three years, then you can buy it". Where is the logic in that?
Mr Connolly was waxing strong, saying, "They can always take their money and go and buy somewhere else". That may not be the case. Their financial position may well have improved to the point where they can take advantage of a favourable Government offer to buy the house that they are living in, but they may not be able to go that extra yard and buy a house on the private market, because it is just a little bit beyond their means. It is not a valid argument to say that they can take their money and buy somewhere else. Very often they cannot. For no reason that has any logic that I can see, Mr Connolly immediately puts the housing tenant offside because he will not sell him a house after five years, but if the tenant likes to wait till eight years he can buy a house.
If the Minister sells a house, he then has the money to buy another one and take somebody off the waiting list. So he can satisfy two people by selling a house. He can satisfy the person who is living in it and wants to buy it, and he can satisfy the next person on the Housing Trust waiting list, because he has money to buy another house to put a person on the waiting list in. I said that Mr Connolly's position lacks political nous because he is adversely affecting two people, or two families, by declining to allow a property to be sold. I do not see the logic in his position. His position is totally illogical, and Mr Connolly has not advanced any good reason why he should oppose this Bill.
Mr Connolly put an argument in which he used Reid as the example. Why he used Reid I do not know. What is wrong with Charnwood, or perhaps Richardson in Tuggeranong? He referred to getting $300,000 for a house in Reid. It would be a pretty disadvantaged tenant who could afford to buy a house for $300,000 after five years; that is all I can say! So it is a fairly unrealistic scenario, but it was Mr Connolly's scenario. He said, "If we take $300,000 for a house in Reid, we cannot buy another one in Reid".
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