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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3879 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

At the moment there are people who are going to have real affordability problems. They are No 3 on the segmented waiting list at the moment. The experience of other states and territories is that that third category does not get a look in. So what we have now is a group of people in our community who are not acknowledged by Housing's policy section. They used to be, but now they are not. The government says, "It is okay; we are focusing on those who really need our help and we do not think the other two groups are that important." That is what will happen and that third group is where you will see more people thrown into poverty. That is why the response in the community from people who know about these issues is one of outrage. I understand that Mr Moore is new to this area. That is why I am so disappointed with the fact that he has taken it on with the enthusiasm that he has. People with expertise in the field say that this is a very dangerous policy.

Mr Moore referred several times with great emphasis to an amount of $400 million. I want to see the breakdown for that. I was hoping to see it circulated so we could understand where that figure came from because it would be useful to have it in an informed debate. I quickly got out the budget and found that the output for housing assistance payments was $35 million, and housing assistance is what we are talking about. But if you are looking at assets, you are looking at the cost of the buildings and you are into $500 million - odd in the capital works booklet.

My guess as to where that $400 million came from is that Mr Moore is imagining that suddenly he is going to build all these houses. We would like more houses to be built. We know that there is a real problem with that as Mr Wood talks about it in this place quite often. Because of the refurbishment of existing flat complexes there has suddenly been a reduction in accessibility for accommodation. We know that there is a need for more houses to be built. We think that it is a primary responsibility of government to be taking that on.

Of course there is a problem with finding the sort of money required, but this government should be taking a long - term strategy and looking at this matter in a realistic way, instead of spending $70 million on a stadium and $20 million on a car race. You will have assets if you are building houses. It will not be a recurrent problem, as the government likes to say in justification for spending money one - off on silly things such as car races and sports stadiums, although there is a $45 million asset there, even though we only wanted a $12 million asset.

Unfortunately, Mr Rugendyke seems to have misunderstood what Mr Moore's amendment is saying. Mr Rugendyke is saying that it is okay as Mr Moore is saying that he is going to go and do the work again, but what he is going to do is to implement the very reform agenda that is the result of this response -

Mr Rugendyke: No, I did not misunderstand.

MS TUCKER: Mr Rugendyke says that he did not misunderstand.

Mr Rugendyke: You did not listen to my speech.

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