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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 336 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

With inequality of wealth so badly entrenched in our society, there are many people in the ACT who cannot afford to buy or rent housing in the private market. Charitable organisations take on some of the burden of providing housing to low income people but government has to take most of the responsibility because of the scope of need. The question, then, is how governments can provide affordable housing to those people whose incomes are inadequate for them to find housing in other ways.

Public housing was first established on a large scale immediately following the Second World War, with the first Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement concluded in 1945. The agreement provided cheap loans from the Commonwealth to the states, to build public housing dwellings. During the period of the first agreement, which ran until 1956, the number of public housing dwellings went from zero to over 100,000.

After this large initial investment in public housing, the Menzies government diverted substantial Commonwealth funds from new public housing to schemes to assist low income people to purchase their public housing dwellings. This led to a slowing of the increase in the number of publicly-owned dwellings.

While assistance with home ownership helps many people break the poverty cycle and benefits will often flow to the children of those people assisted with purchasing, there will always be some people whose circumstances prevent them from purchasing property, even if generous government assistance is provided. There are also people who are on low incomes for a relatively short period of time. Whilst they definitely cannot afford the private market when on a low income, a substantial public investment to enable home ownership is not warranted. Public housing is needed for people in this situation.

Sadly, successive ACT governments have not put enough emphasis on maintaining our stock of public dwellings. The stock purchased with loans given throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s has been allowed to run down, to the point where repair or refurbishment is now being deemed uneconomic. These dwellings have been sold for the value of the land they stand on, and the money has been used to purchase properties that are further from the town centres and the necessary services located there.

I have repeatedly expressed grave concerns about the fact that the number of ACT public housing dwellings was permitted to decline under the last Liberal government, and that this Labor government has not committed to expanding the number of dwellings. Our population is growing, and so is the number of low income people. The private rental market in the ACT has become steadily more expensive, to the point where Canberra is the most expensive place to rent a house and is second only to Sydney in the cost of renting an apartment. Without public housing, certainly many more people would be homeless-and because we have an inadequate number of public dwellings now, we already have a growing homeless population.

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