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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1621 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

Occasionally, I get people complaining about ratbag elements in their streets. They always blame the public housing tenants. Sometimes it is true, sometimes it is false, but I have not noticed members of the Real Estate Institute going there and getting themselves dirty by trying to sort out social problems in the street. I have not seen members of the Housing Industry Association going down those streets and sorting out those social issues, working with the police, welfare services and a range of other support services, but I have seen Housing do so. The number of times I have convened cross-agency meetings and found the first person to arrive was from Housing is huge. What are they doing in running around this town? They are out there protecting, upholding and enforcing people's rights to a secure house.

We have to understand that ACT Housing isn't a welfare agency. It is a real estate company, but it does not regard itself as a real estate agent; it regards itself as a support mechanism to make sure that people's basic need for protection, for housing, is actually provided. Of course, this is part of the government's commitment to making sure that all the resources of government are available to people in need, whether it is health, education or community safety. It is part of that total package.

This side of the house will accept the motion from Mrs Burke and will not vote against it, but we do reject the words that were used in the speech. The words were a bit sweeping, a bit fanciful, unsubstantiated, remote and in my view unnecessary. If, in fact, there is a need to draw attention to a slight deficiency in the system, by all means do so; but do not bag the system out because, in my experience of five years in this place, I have never seen the system work better for those people in need.

I will give one final example. This happened when I was in opposition. In a perverse sense, it is congratulations to Mr Smyth, who was housing minister at the time. I had arrive on my doorstep a family from Kosovo, a mother, a daughter and two sons. The women in the family had been raped, the father of the family had been shot in front of them and the boys had been belted to within an inch of their lives before they escaped to the hills. With assistance from a number of people, they came back together, escaped from that area and came to Australia.

They lived with friends on the north side of town; I am not sure whether it was Ainslie or Dickson. But having 15 people in one house was just too much. After a while they found themselves on the street. They applied for priority housing and got nowhere. Only one member of the family spoke English well; believe it or not, it was the youngest boy. The older boy spoke a little English and neither of the women spoke any English at all. They came to me with the assistance of Mohammed Berjaoui, who is well known to many people in the Labor Party as a social worker in the town, and a magnificent man at that.

I phoned the minister's office and explained the situation to them. No, I tell a lie: I rang Housing first and they said, "Sorry, we've got nothing."I rang the minister's office and said, "We cannot allow these people to live on the streets."The officers in Housing bent every rule, searched high and low and by 4 o'clock that day they had accommodated that family. Do you know why they did that, Mr Speaker? It was because they are a compassionate, expert set of bureaucrats in whom I have to express absolute and complete faith.

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