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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 4565 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

ACT towards public/private partnerships without necessarily considering how they will work here in the territory.

Considering that private sector finance is more expensive and that the private sector needs to take away a profit, it is hard to see how these partnerships will create a larger stock of housing in the longer term. The exception would be if there are some amazing efficiencies I am yet to be aware of that the private sector can bring to housing provision.

I think we can look at moving from public/private partnerships to how the private sector provides housing. There has been enormous hostility from the government to ideas directed towards this end. I look forward to the economic white paper which the government response suggests and I hope it will put forward some alternative proposals in relation to the provision of private sector housing and how the private sector can be encouraged to bring about more affordable housing stock.

In the last 10 years ACT Housing has been forced to cannibalise itself by selling stock to undertake vital upgrades. Fortunately they have been able to justify the sale of high-value stock in the inner north and inner south to fund new housing in Tuggeranong and Gungahlin, as well as Belconnen. Although the total number of dwellings has decreased, the decrease has not been as large as it would have been if their initial stock had been concentrated in areas with lower land values. However, we will reach the end of this road soon and a stronger commitment to ongoing capital injections from the government will be required if our stock of public housing is not to be run down to nothing.

Often the government's response when we talk about the amount of public housing stock is that the ACT has more public housing stock per capita than any other state or territory. Whilst that is an important statistic, I think we also need to look at the age of our stock, how the stock is being utilised and what the future provision of that stock will be. The lines in the graphs are actually meeting, and the provision of public housing stock is decreasing as the population grows.

I was glad to see the government accept the task force recommendations relating to barriers to investment presented by our existing planning system. The fact that affordable housing providers have so far been required to pay a full change-of-use charge has prevented a number of developments, including ones to alleviate our aged persons accommodation shortage. I hope to see a greater emphasis in the work of ACTPLA on promoting affordable housing.

We need to have a vehicle to develop a broader direction in relation to affordable housing, and that vehicle needs to be part of the planning system. Whether or not it is LAPACs, whether or not it is community planning forums or something else, we need to have that vehicle. So I encourage the Minister for Planning and the minister for housing to give more emphasis to broad planning measures that promote affordable housing throughout our suburbs.

Overall, the tone of the government response is positive and shows that the government recognises that a shortage of affordable housing is one of the key risk problems it has responsibility for addressing. I believe this represents a change from possibly a few years ago and I think it is a result of a high level of media attention given to spiralling property

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