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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2988 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

all our suburbs have some public housing. Those without public housing include suburbs like O'Malley. If there is one left in Forrest, that would be all. I do not advocate that we need to actually buy back into those areas at this stage. I think that is unrealistic. But we have to be careful about where we sell off our stock, to ensure that general equity is retained.

The second concern that I have is the issue of tenure. As Ms Tucker pointed out, there are people who are in public housing that consider their house their home, and it is very much their home and they intend to remain in their home, as some of my close neighbours have done very recently, until they are either too ill or too old and too ill to live there. In a couple of examples, they have actually died in their own homes. They have always considered them their own homes, because they are publicly owned housing stock; they are not just welfare housing. Often these people have, in fact, moved into quite lucrative jobs and are paying fully for the value of the public housing in which they live, the home in which they live. Interestingly enough, of course, that effectively subsidises those who are in the welfare side of it.

I suppose another issue that is of concern is discrimination. One of the big advantages of public housing is that we can very closely govern the issue of discrimination, whereas it is very difficult to prevent discrimination in private housing, particularly against single mothers, against gay people, against Aboriginal people. No matter what laws are in place, people can find excuses to get around them; whereas, in fact, our public housing system has been able to avoid those sorts of discrimination. There is a concern there as well. So far, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have dealt with three concerns. I have another four to deal with. These are concerns because often there are ways of dealing with them. Because I suspect that the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement negotiations will go ahead in the direction that is proposed, I hope that the Minister will take these concerns and deal with them. Perhaps there are solutions that can be found and that I am not aware of.

The issue of a bond is another issue at the moment. My understanding is that there is a very limited, if any, bond in terms of our public housing, whereas private tenancy agreements almost always have $1,000 to $2,000 bonds. That is a significant sum of money which may well be difficult for people to find. On the other hand, having been a landlord, I understand why it is that people ask for those bonds and why it is actually necessary. That is another issue that needs to be dealt with. Figures that the Government has on market values of private rentals may well be inflated; so, this whole approach of turning public housing into a private entrepreneurial situation may well inflate market prices. That is a danger and, therefore, we will have to look at how to regulate the market, I guess on a national basis, with all the problems that that creates in trying to compare one place to another.

The other issue, I guess, is the creating of homelessness. We know there have been a number of occasions when tenants whom I suppose you could think of as recidivous tenants have finally been removed from public housing in the Australian Capital Territory, but they have been very rare. I think the Minister is probably conscious of the specific situations. It is a very rare situation; whereas, of course, those who are evicted for not being able to pay the rent and so forth would be much more common in the private market, and understandably so. What we then create is a series of social problems that,

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