Page 1222 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 9 April 2008
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have spoken a lot about the dream of home ownership for first home buyers but the problem of housing affordability is not just confined to our young; it is also a problem for our old. We have seen the cost of land going up and up. It does not just drive up the cost of land for first home buyers; it drives up the cost of land for older people who want to find more appropriate accommodation.
I will give two examples which are close to my heart because they are in my constituency. There was the shameful—shameful—six years of planning mismanagement, duckshoving and paper shuffling before we got to the stage where Calvary aged care could fully establish their facilities at Calvary in Bruce. That was an important facility which was on hold and was going nowhere for a very long time. The sum total of that was that the cost of the individual units in those places has been driven up.
Another instance where the cost of units was driven up by the carelessness, thoughtlessness or perhaps malice of the previous minister for planning related to St Vincent’s church in Aranda. St Vincent’s had some land which was inaccessible to anyone but them; it was not being used for any other purpose. The changes to the territory plan for supported housing on community land made it possible for them to build aged persons accommodation on that, but the delays that the community incurred over that were entirely shameful.
The shame of it all was capped off by the minister’s decision to impose a change-of-use charge—a change-of-use charge on a block of land which was already owned by the same organisation and which could not under any circumstances be sold. It could not be sold off; it had no access except through an existing block of land, through a school. It could not be sold off; there was no way that the Aranda church community could ever recoup a windfall profit. But they imposed a change-of-use charge which drove up the cost of those units by a figure of something like $35,000 per unit. That is the dead hand of the Stanhope government when it comes to planning for aged care.
The other area of considerable concern is healthcare, particularly dentistry. Over the years, we have seen the falling use of bulk-billing by doctors in the ACT. We have also seen a shortage of GPs, in particular, within the ACT. The Stanhope government has not done enough about it. One of the projects that we have spoken of—I have spoken of it regularly as a worthwhile project—is that in west Belconnen, but we are still waiting to see that come to fruition.
One of the other areas of priority for COTA was dentistry. It is significant to see that there is very little movement in the provision of dentistry through the ACT government. This needs to also be looked at through the prism of what is being done by the commonwealth. The Stanhope government is pretty keen to criticise the Howard government on almost every turn, but we have to remember that it was the Howard government which introduced a substantial amount of money—$350 million, from memory—for dental assistance for people with complex and chronic needs, people who are, disproportionately, older Australians.
This program was immediately dismantled by the Rudd government and replaced with two programs: the dental health payment, which is not targeted at people of any
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