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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2688 ..

MR SPEAKER: The question now is: That paragraph (5) be added to the motion.

Amendment negatived.

Amendment (by Mr Berry) negatived:

Add the following new paragraph:

"(6) that the ACT Government use the forthcoming budget for 1996-97 to replace the $10.4 million cut in public housing funding which Mrs Carnell has handed back to the Commonwealth.".

MS REILLY (12.25), in reply: Listening to the debate this morning, I think it is quite timely that this motion has come up at this time. Mr Moore seemed to be concerned about when it should be discussed. It is very good that we have had the opportunity to put this debate into the public domain. I think it was a great surprise to a number of people to find out on Monday morning that the Chief Minister had happily given away $10.4m of the public housing budget. Even her own Housing Minister seemed to be unaware of this fact. It is very important that the whole community be aware of what is going on in relation to public housing. It is interesting to note that you can just slash $10.4m out of the housing budget and, in the words of the Housing Minister, this will have no impact. What do you normally do with $10.4m?

Mrs Carnell: Build new houses, more than we have now.

MS REILLY: One would hope that you would build new houses, but if the money is not there you cannot build new houses. What is going to happen to the jobs that would have been created? What is going to happen to the people who work in the housing sector, the people who provide maintenance for public housing? Housing Trust tenants will have an even poorer quality of maintenance.

I was very relieved to hear the Minister quote Senator Newman as saying that for people receiving rental assistance it will be only 25 per cent of their income. What is going to happen to that when the rental assistance is a very restricted amount of money and the rents become higher and higher? Are people going to be forced further and further out to find cheaper rents, or are more and more families going to be forced to live together to be able to afford any rent at all? I think this needs to be carefully looked at.

The most amazing discussion to listen to today was the discussion about the second part of my motion, which talks about the maintenance of mix. You will note that I did not say exactly how many houses there should be in any suburb, exactly what size they should be or how it should be. What we are saying is that we have this major public asset that is available for people within the community, particularly those people who are vulnerable, and we want to maintain that asset. We were not going to talk about ridiculous things like suggesting that we have to have a mix in all suburbs or that we would go to the extent of buying in a suburb like O'Malley. Does that prove anything? Does it prove that it is an equitable public housing sector when you have a house in O'Malley?

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