Page 4245 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2005
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The issue of social mix within the public housing community needs to be addressed here too. It is particularly convenient for those with an interest in reducing the stock of public housing in the ACT—and that includes private property developers, some residents living in high-value suburbs and some areas of government—to ignore the evidence that a social mix of tenants, including a reasonable proportion paying market rent at any time, has positive social benefits for the tenant body and Canberra’s wider population, on the one hand, and assists the housing provider to manage its property portfolio on the other. The paper commissioned by Housing ACT to specifically look at that issue came to the same conclusion. So when property owners, would-be developers or even proud government officials, make the point that the ACT has a high proportion of public or government housing by Australian standards, that is no argument to cut the proportion back.
Our view is that, based on the available evidence and experience, we need to grow the government housing stock in the territory. Furthermore, I do not think the private rental market is a better place to be in than public or community housing. However, I understand the very real benefits for many people of individual and collective home ownership. Security of tenure plays a big part and is probably the main reason why living in their own home is such a desirable option for so many in Australia. Helping people into home ownership is a good idea that the Greens support.
The proportion of government housing in the ACT used to be much higher. There are many people in this room, I would suggest, who lived in and purchased their guvvie house under helpful circumstances. Constituents have advised me of members of this Assembly who live in ex-guvvie houses, those who had government housing and those who were able to buy their government houses. I am not making a moral judgment here. Providing support for people to buy their government houses is not an unreasonable way to spread some of the benefits of our affluent society.
When we recently passed legislation in the Assembly defining “concessional leases”, one of the provisions specifically excluded such home blocks because they were in part a gift to the home owner from the government. If we had not excluded them from the list of concessional leases in the ACT, the ACT community would still have an interest in them. At the end of the 1960s, if you wanted to buy your government house—and people were freely encouraged to do so—it would have been assessed at cost price; that is, how much it cost the Department of Works to build it. You would have put down five per cent of that as a deposit.
Mr Hargreaves: No.
DR FOSKEY: You would borrow the remainder from the housing commission or the department—
Mr Hargreaves: No.
DR FOSKEY: This was at the end of the 1960s.
Mr Hargreaves: Yes, I know; I did it then.
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