Page 3110 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 August 2008
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government agrees. It is an important amendment because it makes the community housing standards a disallowable instrument.
As the next proposed new section in this bill specifies that community housing providers must comply with the standards, the precious proposition that such standards would be simply notifiable was inadequate. It may be government practice to develop documents such as these standards in consultation with tenants and community housing providers, but we cannot always guarantee that such a process would be respectful or exhaustive, or even occur at all. It could also be that such standards already exist; however, even a modification of such standards needs to be pursued in a collaborative and cooperative manner.
The opportunity of holding these standards to account that extra step, by moving to have them disallowed in this Assembly, is a guarantee, at least to some extent, of a more careful or rigorous approach.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (6:51): We will be supporting this amendment. We do support greater scrutiny; by providing for this to be a disallowable instrument, we believe that that will be achieved. Once again, providers have sought this change. We believe that the standards can have significant implications for the quality of the safeguard, flexibility for new entrants. These important rules should be subject to scrutiny and we support the amendment.
Amendment agreed to.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (6:52): I move amendment No 2 circulated in my name [see schedule 1 at page 3113].
This amendment separates the expectations of monitoring guidelines for affordable housing and community housing providers. The amendment does not limit the guidelines but provides some guidance for them. It picks up on concerns expressed to government that the rigour and strength needed to provide appropriate oversight of Canberra’s large affordable housing business, whose charter is to use its resources—which are ACT government assets—as leverage to grow the supply of affordable housing, are of a different order than the oversight appropriate for a small community housing provider whose responsibilities are more tightly focused on tenant wellbeing and whose vision is less business based and expansive.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (6:53): We will be supporting this amendment. The Greens’ amendment aligns the monitoring of guidelines more precisely than the separate risk criteria established for the two sets of providers—that is, the risk criteria for affordable providers set out by the government in 25F (2). These same criteria are not replicated by the government in relation to community providers under 25G. It does make sense for consistency between the two areas of the bill.
I note that once again the community providers have strongly argued for this change. Most community housing providers are already under rigorous regimes for accreditation and independent auditing every year. For instance, providers like Havelock Housing are accredited and regulated under the national community housing process.
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