Page 2317 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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Previous speakers have touched on something that I am also going to delve into, and that is one of the common complaints that I receive from constituents about public housing issues: the antisocial and even violent behaviour of some bad tenants in public housing properties. Some constituents live in genuine fear for their safety in public housing complexes, and many have made a point to insist that their names be withheld in any follow-up on these issues. I do not wish to be alarmist about the issue but I will say that I think there are ongoing problems with bad tenants in public housing on a scale that I think is unacceptable.
In the private rental market, you would simply not see the kind of behaviour that I regularly receive complaints about in public housing properties. Unfortunately, Housing ACT seem to take a view that suggests a strong reluctance to enforce basic standards of behaviour that would exist under any private rental contract and believe that this may in some way be an affront to the civil liberties of public housing tenants. Contrary to what some people may think, this is not a compassionate approach. It is an approach that shows little regard for the vast majority of public housing tenants, who are negatively affected by the unacceptable behaviour of bad tenants.
I have had people take these issues up with me. To be quite frank with you, I thought they were probably embellishing the facts, so I decided to go into a comprehensive examination of one set of complaints regarding Stuart Flats in Griffith. I have to say that I was sceptical. I thought the person was overdramatising the situation, probably embellishing the story to excite my interest, and, unlike others in this place, I do not rush into making public pronouncements on all manner of things when people complain.
Mrs Burke has a track record of going to the media first on every matter and then checking the facts out—and sometimes they do not actually accord. But I have had a practice of making sure that what I am being told stacks up. I am happy to lose a couple of weeks media opportunity to be sure I am right, and quite often you find that actually the story is not as you are told. But in the case of a matter raised earlier this year I did make inquiries, and I was taken aback when Mr Corbell responded to me and indicated that the police, as this constituent had indicated, had been called out a very large number of times to Stuart Flats—in fact, the minister’s reply indicated 45 call-outs in a 28-day period in February, five call-outs from the ACT Fire Brigade and three call-outs from ambulance services. Whilst the constituent said that capsicum spray had been used to overpower violent and unruly tenants at the facility, the police declined, because of pending charges and so forth, to specify what force had been used but acknowledged that force had been used to bring people into line.
You could be forgiven for thinking you are in the crook part of Detroit or Chicago when you hear these figures—not in a city of 330,000 people. And this is just one complex in a central part of Canberra with a police call-out profile that I found absolutely staggering. No wonder Mr Pratt keeps asking for more police, because if they are all tied up at that one complex you can imagine in the evening that there are concerns about activities in Civic or elsewhere. If the police are going out there nearly twice a day to address violent and antisocial behaviour, it certainly is soaking up resources from the Woden service, Civic or wherever they come from, to address
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