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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1545 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

going to be transferred are tenanted, and people might not be too fussed about leaving the known ACT Housing for the unknown community sector and who may run that. So, it is difficult, and we are now going to continue with 200 a year.

There is a further problem in this regard. Do you assume that a group of people can get together and manage 10 or 20 homes? That is a skilled task. But I do not see anywhere mention of training. I am not aware of any training happening. I think CHC - Community Housing Canberra - was supposed to do some training. I am not aware that any has happened or even that they have been funded to do training, but if you are transferring homes from ACT Housing, which is experienced - and look at the problems it has - to the community sector, how are they going to be looked after? Are we confident that they will be well treated? I am not sure.

There is supposed to be a high level of tenant participation; it speaks for itself. How much training of that kind have we seen? I know of groups that have joined together in only the last week or two to try to claim some houses and they acknowledge that they know nothing about how to run a cooperative of houses. There is a lot more to be done than making simple, bland statements that we are going to transfer 800 homes over five years to community housing. I think that we are looking at failure and a lot of travail for these people if there is not more hard work at the coalface in providing training, expertise, encouragement and support to these groups.

I mentioned Lachlan Court before. At last the people know now where they stand.

The Minister has said that our current housing stock does not always meet the needs of the community today, and I think that that is probably right, but there is a need for units for single people and we are quite rapidly diminishing the housing stock that meets the needs of single people. Condamine Court has been knocked down and the redevelopment is not finished. We have closed Macpherson Court; now we are closing Lachlan Court. We will be saying in a short period of time that there are not enough housing units for single people. Those people have a right not to be consigned to some distant part of Canberra. I think there are some people - I can be corrected - in Lachlan Court who were transferred from Macpherson Court and who are probably going to be transferred to Burnie Court or somewhere else and I do not think that that is quite the right way to go. I am not blaming the Minister entirely for that because the neglect goes back 30 or 40 years, I freely acknowledge, but the sad fact is that we have not been able to manage the stock that we have.

I am not impressed with arguments from the Minister that these places are 40 years old. Until recently I lived in a place that was 40 years old and it was pretty good. A very large number of the houses in Canberra are getting to that figure of 40 years old. Certainly, across Australia most houses are more than 40 years old. That alone is not sufficient reason to say that we have to knock them down. The problem is what I call and what others call cannibalism. We know the story about Third World countries that buy a fleet of buses and then, as they run out of parts, cannibalise one bus and put the parts into others and then cannibalise another and another and another until there is nothing left. That is what is happening with the houses here. We are cannibalising our houses to maintain a basic stock. I think that is a very poor practice.

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