Page 3244 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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Indeed, what will happen to the tenants of the around 60 public housing properties managed by one of the bona fide community housing providers which are to be transferred to CHC as part of the government’s affordable housing plan? These tenants will have to pay around an extra $160 a fortnight under this plan which, for all or most of them, will not be sustainable. This means that 60 more households will be looking for somewhere else to live.
Minister Hargreaves talks in the progress document about community housing, but to my knowledge nowhere mentions any of the community housing providers in the ACT—Havelock Housing Association, ECHO and TAS. The people who are most likely to be left in this void are age pensioners and people with a disability. They simply do not have the means to rent anything in the affordable housing offered by Community Housing Canberra. The name is a total misnomer. This is not what community housing is.
Ara Creswell of the ACT Council of Social Service has quite rightly talked about the need to differentiate between affordable housing and community housing. It is important to help first homebuyers and people in the middle, but how much more important is it to help people at the bottom who are even more vulnerable and who have considerably fewer means? What a strange priority this government has, and it is giving no less than $40 million of public money, plus 132 properties, for this venture. Could it be a vote catcher for the Gungahlin and Belconnen areas, where the new land is being released? This government is cynical enough for that.
According to the latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare SAAP data for 2005-06, of the SAAP clients in the ACT who exited services, 28 per cent went to public housing, 15 per cent to private rental and five per cent to community housing. The remaining 52 per cent went to other SAAP services or to institutional care. This is clearly where the need is. The government needs to invest in community housing and it is not doing this. The ACT is the only jurisdiction in Australia which is not seeing any growth in community housing. Clearly, to this point, the government has put all its eggs into one basket and is enabling only one provider, and that one is not using a true community housing model. Why is the government not using Havelock Housing Association, for example, which is, after all, the only nationally accredited community housing provider in the ACT, to deliver accommodation to those most in need?
Sadly, the government is not promoting enough diversity in the type of housing options for Canberrans. There must be seamless transitions for people to exit from public housing when their conditions improve, but now there is a big gap in the market and the government has only added to it. In the meantime, public housing is increasingly being given to the homeless and fewer people are finding places now than two years ago, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report.
Declining government funding has been behind this nationwide decrease in public housing stock. Almost 40 Canberrans are waiting to be allocated priority public housing, with 54 days the average waiting time. Some 354 people are waiting for standard public housing and, on average, they will wait just over two years for a home. About 740 are awaiting high-needs housing and will have to wait a year, according to
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