Page 4246 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2005
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DR FOSKEY: We can correct that later.
Mr Hargreaves: Yes, I will.
DR FOSKEY: —and pay it back at five per cent or so over 50 years. To shift to more recent times, by the mid-1990s you paid nearer market price, although arguably perhaps not quite as high. To help you into home ownership, if your income was at the right level—not too high and not too low—and you had a 10 or 12 per cent deposit, you could borrow the remainder from the housing trust, I think, at very reasonable interest rates, with repayments adjusted to your income.
In the current context we should remember that any property sold to a tenant is a diminution in housing stock. In addition to reinstituting support for that sale process, Housing ACT needs to be funded to grow its stock. As members of this place would be well aware, one of the strategies employed effectively in many other jurisdictions but rejected here is inclusionary zoning, where a proportion of all housing development must be public or social housing. Concerns have been raised by members when I have put this proposal forward as a motion, but there are enough devices available to business and government to address those concerns and make this work. The benefit—and perhaps the problem—is that that ensures public housing stock will grow rather than shrink.
If we want to encourage tenants to purchase their homes at the other end of the spectrum, then a supply of new properties is essential. Unfortunately, the Howard government has chosen to shift the focus of commonwealth funding support from housing provision to rental rebates. Directing funds towards the rent bill assists people on low incomes but does not deliver more affordable housing; in some cases it simply supports higher rents. As a consequence, we have seen state housing providers reducing stock and targeting tenancies increasing tightly to people in desperate need.
The shift to rental rebates, combined with the negative gearing provisions in Australia’s taxation regime, has resulted in a boom at the higher end of the market. Increases in private rents make saving more difficult and thus create another barrier for people to get a deposit together for home ownership. That is why we have argued for the ACT government to pursue shared equity schemes, where people can buy into home ownership in partnership with a community housing provider or other appropriate partner. We know such schemes need to be carefully constructed because locking people into unsustainable loans will deliver the worst rather than the best outcomes. I am aware that CARE financial counselling is very concerned that such schemes can do real damage. I accept that we need to be very careful in the way those schemes are set up, but there are many programs around the world where people own a part, and then eventually all, of their home.
The BedZED development in Beddington in outer London, for example, is a zero emission development—hence the “z” in BedZED—which generates its own energy through biomass electricity generation from local suburban tree prunings. It incorporates easy, efficient and cheap car-pooling into the building design in community organisations. It consists of about one-third public housing, one-third private housing and one-third shared equity housing. The key ingredient in the success of this development is the sense of community that the mix of housing types and the commitment to zero
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