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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3828 ..

private units, it is already an issue, and I do not know how you address that. I know one tenant at the moment whose unit is over the garbage area of a block of units, and that is the public housing unit in that particular development. That is already a problem.

What is the answer? This is an interesting thing that has come up in this debate for me. People are basically challenging the notion that we want to actually spread social housing around the suburbs. They are saying, “People will not feel comfortable; they’ll be in a posh place and they’ll feel stigmatised.” Well, I will take members back to debates we had in this place years ago when the Liberal government started to tell us that social public housing was not social public housing—this was of course from the federal government as well—it is targeted welfare housing.

The obvious response to that from all social commentators is: “Oops, you are creating targeted welfare housing; there is going to be a problem with stigma.” Let’s go right back to the beginning of this debate about the role of public housing and social housing in our community, and it should not be targeted welfare housing. Of course we should be able to have an environment in which we understand that housing, as a basic human right, is something that really has to be given a higher status in any government’s social policy.

But we have got a situation right now where, yes, we have got both Labor and Liberal saying, “Targeted welfare housing. Not possible to do it any other way.” I could argue for the next half an hour about how you obviously can set up systems with full paying rent, subsidising those who are on low rent, et cetera. We had all that debate through the inquiry of the public housing committee, but I will not go over that on the record.

But just getting back to that position that has been put by a number of people here that the public housing people will not like to be in a posh place: I talk to a lot of public housing tenants. There are various views about that. It is true to say that some people do not like the idea. I would say debates like this in this place do not help with the stigma of public housing. “Anyway, it is going to bring down the tone of the neighbourhood,” and so on. But there are different views about that.

Some people in public housing definitely do not want to be in a situation where there are a lot of other public housing tenants, because there can be social issues of putting together a lot of people who are on a very low income and struggling with social isolation, which they often are, which is often because of issues such as mental health problems, disability, substance abuse, unemployment, et cetera. Basically, the social system has failed a lot of these people in different ways, whether it is through support for their disabilities or disadvantage or social isolation. People coming here as immigrants, refugees and so on, can also be, obviously, extremely disadvantaged.

There are now different theories as well in academia about whether or not you put people all together, but I think the general consensus is that you have to have choice; you have to have options; and if you do have a lot of people brought together in one environment, you have to have very strong social support of all kinds, including within the buildings, community centres and so on, development workers and broader social services to support them. In regard to some of the things that I have heard said today, I think this has been a very superficial and quite scary debate.

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