Page 635 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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MR STEFANIAK: We have already passed that? Well, that is much easier. Madam Assistant Speaker, thank you. That is good. I did not actually have any problem with Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, but Madam Assistant Speaker sounds good, so there you go; that is now in the new standing orders.
Is that dream now an impossible dream? We have seen housing stock squeezed. We have seen house prices increase and we have seen land availability stagnate. On top of that, we read in today’s Canberra Times that Canberrans are spending less and are more highly mortgaged than most. And then for people who cannot afford to buy their own home, to achieve that great Australian dream, the rental market has tightened to the point where rental bidding has become almost the norm in Canberra.
What has the government done about this? It has been incredibly slow to respond to these challenges. It has only recently announced a strategy to address some of these challenges. In about April last year the Chief Minister finally deigned to introduce some sort of strategy, probably about six years or so after this government came to power. It was all a bit too little and way too late. It is not rocket science. It is not like we do not have land in the ACT. We do, and we will have land to be developed into the decades to come.
Things as simple as a land bank seem to have not crossed the government’s mind until very, very recently indeed. It is not like we do not have land. Why on earth couldn’t they have a land bank? Why on earth couldn’t they plan? They are meant to be a Labor government. Labor governments supposedly should be able to plan, but they could not, and we have seen very, very little and it is very late. A lot of people have missed out and we are seeing the result of government inactivity in this crucially important area.
Let us not leave out our lower income groups—those people that can afford neither the great Australian dream nor even a rental property. These are the people who should have access to public housing. And how does the Stanhope Labor government respond to these people? It does so with the stroke of a pen. In 2006 this socially minded Labor government proudly announced it had halved its public housing waiting lists. How was that achieved? It was achieved by cutting the household eligibility criterion from $1,000 a week to $700 per week.
Mr Smyth: All those rich people on $800 a week.
MR STEFANIAK: Exactly. So today a household earning $1,000 per week—and I put it to you that they are struggling—is facing competing for a private sector rental property, facing bidding wars potentially and facing rents of about $400 or more per week on a rental property—40 per cent or more of their income. So our young families face an uphill battle on housing affordability, and the ones at the lower end of the scale face an uphill battle in terms of just affording the rent. We constantly hear horrendous stories of people being evicted, who have trouble getting into public housing and of waiting lists that are still a very great problem, despite the way the government tries to dress things up.
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