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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4124 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

can have a profound effect on costs faced by people suffering economic hardship by reducing the amount they need to spend to get certain basic needs like water and warmth in a cold climate, and, most importantly, shelter. Housing is the major expenditure item faced by most low-income earners. Therefore, I repeat that the ACT Government's primary strategy for reducing poverty must be to reduce the housing costs of people on low incomes.

The most effective way to achieve that is to increase the availability of public and community housing. That is the only direct and effective mechanism we have for addressing homelessness and housing-related poverty, because the private rental market and the home purchase market do not adequately and affordably meet the needs of low-income earners. However, in this budget $10.4m has been returned to the Commonwealth from the housing budget to meet the whole of the ACT's fiscal contributions commitment. Next year $10.8m will be taken, and the year after $5m. To take $10m that could have housed people on our waiting list, while bringing down a budget with a $10m surplus, is unjustifiable, in our view.

The second shameful element in the housing budget was the introduction of the Kick Start scheme. The Kick Start scheme was rushed into consideration 14 days before the budget, and officers in the relevant section of ACT Housing have confirmed publicly, Mr Speaker, that they had three days to examine the proposal. Those same officers told a public meeting that they had been working carefully towards considered changes to the existing home purchase assistance schemes but that the introduction of Kick Start out of the blue had cut across that work.

Kick Start is a Housing Industry Association initiative developed in conjunction with two banks which have since become one bank. It was designed to stimulate activity for HIA members who were holding a stock of undeveloped blocks and vacant new houses in the outer suburbs. It is a quite unremarkable deposit gap scheme which relied predominantly on Government funds and actually promises very little in the way of industry subsidy. Despite that, and despite the Government's religious adherence in other sectors to the enforcement of competitive tendering, no opportunity was given for competitive proposals for a deposit gap scheme. Kick Start was rushed into the budget by the Chief Minister's Department in an attempt to bolster the very weak job targets in the budget. However, because no market assessment was done and because applicants have a range of buying choices, the Government has no real data on which to base its job creation estimates. The needs of public housing tenants were never really a consideration in the development of this scheme. Kick Start is a misuse of public housing funds.

In future, if the proposed new Commonwealth-State housing arrangements are introduced, the power of the ACT Government to determine the adequacy of the public and community housing stock will be increased. If this year's housing budget is any guide, the ACT can look forward to increasing homelessness and housing-related poverty as we approach 2000 - a disgraceful situation.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

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