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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2972 ..

ACT. These people need to be supported to be part of the community. The ACT government is not leading the way in terms of disability employment. That seriously needs to be rectified. People with disabilities need support to contribute to the community, as we know they can.

MRS BURKE (10.49): Mr Smyth has touched on a few points. Where do I start with housing? Quite frankly, had the minister been here no doubt he would have been able to respond. He probably would have got fairly hot under the collar in doing so. As he has said in this place before, he is quite happy for me to keep going out via the media. At first he got very cross that I was out there with the media. That seems to be the only way I can get any resolution for the people contacting my office.

The minister would say, “Well, we’ve put this amount of money at it. We’re doing this; we’re doing that.” Simply throwing money at a problem is not the be-all and end-all. Again, we have another department where stronger leadership needs to be shown. Commitment needs to be shown by the government and the minister to lead a department that obviously has an extremely tough job. Indicative of that is the fact that we have a huge turnover of housing managers. Tenants ring into my office with many areas of disappointment. Housing managers are always being shifted. There is no stability. Tenants cannot form relationships with housing managers. They no sooner get on board than there is a change.

Where is that money going? The devil is always in the detail. We have had very little detail about where, for instance, the $33.2 million is going. The site at Burnie Court is still lying vacant. Public housing is about putting roofs over people’s heads. A small piece of land has been sold, and works for aged care are currently under way. This is good to see. The decommissioning of Currong apartments was agreed to. The move to create more houses and put more roofs over people’s heads seems to be a long time coming. There is lots of talk, but we do not see bricks and mortar.

We have an increasing and compounding problem in terms of the refurbishment of the older buildings, particularly the multiunit complexes in Canberra. I understand that some of those are slowly coming back on board. But again, matters have been allowed to get behind. This has caused a real bottleneck. We have more people than we should have on the waiting list, because there are a couple of hundred or more empty units awaiting refurbishment.

Mr Wood has explained, for reasons that he knows best, why there is such a delay. We have further delays in Fraser Court. We still have a problem. We probably have 3½ thousand people backlogged. They are waiting and getting extremely frustrated because of the government’s inaction when it comes to a commitment to get the buildings built.

I mentioned other difficulties, such as money being thrown at it. During the budget estimates process I was pleased to hear what I believe to be a big problem with maintenance requests and the way that we do maintenance. Many years ago I started expressing my concern about the way that this was done.

I am the first to say that, if a system does not work, we should not keep it. If it is not working, we need to look at it, address the problem and find better ways of doing it. This

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