Page 1949 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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certainly too much public housing that is energy inefficient, in poor condition, and not well-configured to meet demand.
The extraordinary thing is that the housing budget for 2006-07 is a charade of public relations words and magical figures. Perhaps housing really is important to the ACT government, but the government is too embarrassed to admit what it has been doing to it. The government claims to have met its election commitment to deliver $30 million for stock expansion, but these figures are extremely misleading: $18 million of it is being funded by cuts in ACT Housing’s administration; 500 houses are to be sold; eligibility criteria will tighten; and SAAP will lose funding. To top this off, the bottom line for housing is $13 million less than it was for the last budget and the government spent $7.7 million less on housing in 2005-06 than it promised. In doing so, the ACT government in endangering the public housing system even further.
Tightening the eligibility criteria will ensure that people with very limited incomes and with very few options still will not have secure and affordable housing. It will become a kind of competitive misery, ensuring that only the most disadvantaged, and presumably deserving and disadvantaged, will have a chance to get into a shrinking pool of homes. I am really concerned at what Canberra will look like in five to 10 years with public housing increasingly limited to people in most desperate need and presumably in places where the land is cheapest. I hope that we are not looking to an increased trend of gated villages for the rich, with the poor relegated to the streets.
Cannibalising public housing is not the way to position ourselves for the immediate future. Evicting tenants paying market rent would simply undermine the viability, social as well as economic, of ACT Housing, leaving us with greater and greater problems. Not only that, but it would also remove community leaders and advocates from public housing, forced to move as they gain a reasonable income.
I would like to know whether any analysis of the welfare to work and WorkChoices programs was fed into these decisions on housing, because secure and affordable housing is the most fundamental need of people doing it tough, and more people will be doing it tough in Canberra, however well off and well educated our benchmarking figures would show us to be. I would like to see the poverty proofing analysis of this government’s overall approach to housing, I would like to see the social impact analysis of the decisions it has made and I would like to see evidence of a plan where one is most needed, but that just has not happened.
The developed world faces an ongoing problem of increasing costs of high-technology medicine. By contrast, Aboriginal communities in central Australia cost the Australian healthcare systems less per capita than the communities of Vaucluse, but whose need is the greater?
Canberra’s privileged economic and educational status means, inevitably, that our health system costs more than others. Of course, we do play an important high-technology role in the region. I am pleased to see the $11 million increase in cross-border revenue in this budget, though I would suggest that a careful look at the role that the ACT’s health system plays in the surrounding regions of New South Wales and Victoria might identify a further increase.
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