Page 2322 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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longer continue to live here.” Why does he have to put up with that? It is because we have got a government department that wants to exercise political correctness. The feeling amongst the neighbours that I have spoken to is that ACT Housing has a culture which is far too sympathetic to people who have demonstrated that they are recidivist offenders.
We all know that there are people in dire straits who have no option but to occupy public housing. To go back to one of the cases that Mr Mulcahy referred to—he was quite right to point out the rental complex—I have also been approached by a number of single mums coming out of broken marriages with kids and trying to regain their lives. They are good people with good children who are struggling at school. They do not have the resources to do the best they can and they are getting mucked around by recidivist offender neighbours. That is the problem.
Everybody deserves the right to have a second chance in their lives. I am afraid that a lot of our Canberrans are finding it difficult to get on and move through the next phase of their lives. Residents in Richardson come to me with the same problem—prostitution in a couple of houses. In Condor it is drug distribution. I was doorknocking in Condor two Saturdays ago and the constant refrain from the street where I was doorknocking was that it is well known, and has been for a long time, as a place where drug distribution occurs.
One poor guy, a tradesman, was at wit’s end. His 14-year-old son had disappeared for four weeks. Apparently this boy had fallen under the spell of the local drug distributor living in a small flat that had also pulled together a lot of other young kids in the area. This poor guy was at wit’s end. He had actually gone to the magistrate and tried to get a recovery order to find his son and bring him home. Unfortunately, the magistrate said, “Well, I am sorry, but your son is six weeks short of turning 14. I do not think it is in anybody’s best interests that I issue a recovery order.” Here was a father pulling his hair out. Gladly, on the day that I doorknocked, his son had been home a couple of days and apparently had come to realise that his situation away from home had not been particularly good.
That is a bit of a long-winded description of a particular case, but it is a good example of how the neighbourhood can be badly affected by a recidivist offender that somebody does not seem to be able to do much about. I do not know whether in this particular case in Condor the police are onto this guy. Who knows? But the question we have to ask ourselves is: what is ACT Housing doing about this guy? If everybody knows that this guy is up to no good and he is affecting his neighbours’ kids and the police have been around there a number of times, why the hell is he still entitled to occupy one of our valuable public housing assets?
I could go on. Out in Kambah there are burglaries and trail bikes ripping through picnic areas and playgrounds. Everybody knows about it and has known about it for a long time. They have written to the minister and phoned ACT Housing, and it just goes on and on.
In Condor again, a woman told me about her mum, who lives in Mawson. Her mum lives in a nice little house, but next door there is round-the-clock activity. Cars turn up
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