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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3878 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

765 days and half last for more than 765 days. For many tenants, therefore, the introduction of three and five - yearly reviews would have no impact on the length of their tenancy. The government pointed out that three and five - yearly review periods also offer substantially more security than the six to 12 - month leases usually offered in private rental accommodation. That is what the government said: the median duration, the average length, is between four and five years, not a lifetime.

We had Mr Moore saying that we have a situation where there are people who will stay longer and that he is of the view that the government is justified in saying that they know through this segmentation that the most needy will be looked after, which is the government's responsibility. Mr Moore has not explored at all who will no longer be eligible for government housing. Who are those people who do not move on after four or five years, Mr Moore? We asked you to do that work. The select committee said, "Please give us an idea of who the policies would impact upon before you progress with them."

I think Mr Moore just misled the house when he said that, basically, the government has agreed with what the committee recommended. He did not even acknowledge half of the first recommendation, namely, the part where the committee said, "Please go and do the work." The committee did not say, "You are absolutely wrong to change this system." The committee said, "Convince us. Do the work. Do the analysis, bring it back to the Assembly and we will debate it." He has not done that. But he stands there, without having done that work, and says again to this place that he is absolutely confident that what he is doing is going to ensure that the needy people in our community will be looked after.

Paragraph 2.7 on page 10 of the committee's report reads:

We know that it is really hard to get private accommodation. It is very hard to rent a private house as the competition is huge for any private rental accommodation. We have this extra high rent and we have a very tight market. The government's submission to the committee also noted that 20 per cent of the applicants for public housing are not on Centrelink payments, but they are still on a very low income, within the two lowest ABS quintiles. This means that they will not be receiving Centrelink's rental rebate payments. They will be in a poverty trap of the kind described in the poverty taskforce's report.

It might be a good time now to go to the poverty task force's report. Of course, it is just the first one that I am referring to, which was about telling the story. I have not yet had time to read the quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis tells the story. There was reference there to housing. It was said that, throughout the consultation phase, participants identified the resources that they considered necessary to survive. For example, survey participants were asked to identify what poverty meant for them. There was agreement by 73 per cent that poverty meant an inability to afford food and shelter and having to make choices between basic necessities. That means that they have to choose between paying the rent and eating.

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