Page 371 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 2 March 1994
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MR STEVENSON: Okay, here we go. Let us have a look at the situation. The Labor members in this Assembly, again and again, blocked me from appearing on committees. Let us not forget this. I was on a committee. On the Social Policy Committee we had a committee matter - - -
Mr Lamont: Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order under the provisions of standing orders. I point out that Mr Stevenson has misrepresented me and other members of the Labor Government in saying that we have denied him access to committees. In fact, at the commencement of this Assembly we extended an invitation to Mr Stevenson to participate in the committee process.
MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Stevenson, would you just clarify your remarks.
MR STEVENSON: Yes, indeed. As Mr Lamont must well know, I meant the first term.
Mr Lamont: The First Assembly?
MR STEVENSON: That is right. I was on a fluoridation inquiry from 1989 to 1991. Eighty-eight per cent of submissions received by that inquiry were against compulsory artificial fluoride. That information was not represented in the final Government report and it was beholden on me, if I wanted the people to be represented, to put in a dissenting report, which I did. I spent literally hundreds of hours on it. We voted unanimously to reduce fluoride. And what happened? It was not done. So there are some things about committees that one could talk about, but I will not go on at the moment.
I get back to the point at hand. Unless there is something seriously wrong in our logic or our ideology, we must agree that it is a good idea to encourage home ownership; that it is not a good idea to encourage more and more state ownership of property. I know that that is an ideology that some people pay lip-service to; but what they do in practical terms does not make a lot of sense, as has been borne out by recent happenings around the world.
This Bill encourages people to buy properties. When I spoke on this matter in detail last week, I did not know how many properties had been bought by Housing Trust tenants. Thanks to the Minister answering a question I raised in this house, now I do. I said that it would be relevant to know. I said that, if there were many people buying properties, then we would have no fear that home ownership was being discouraged. Then we heard the number. The number was 109 properties over a three-year period. I am not good with a calculator, and I did not bother to work out what the percentage was once you get to point nought something, but it is not much. That was the key. What that told us was that whatever system currently operates does not work. If we agree, as we should, that people should be encouraged to own these properties, we should realise that when people buy a property it is not as if the money were gone. It is not as if the Housing Trust did not have an opportunity to buy more properties. Of course they have an opportunity to do so.
As we all know, a property has to be sold at current market value. It is always possible to buy more properties if necessary, but it may not be so necessary to do that if we encourage people to purchase properties. Anything we do towards that end should be beneficial. The suggestion by the members of the Labor Party was that we should drop the Bill in the bin, chuck it away. I suggested, "It is a good principle. Let us work on it". That did not look like it was going to happen.
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