Page 1367 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I signal my support for the amendments circulated under Ms Bresnan’s name and I thank her office for—I was going to say “concession”; that is not quite the word—being agreeable to a conversation which has ended up with a better expression of what we were both trying to achieve. I also express my appreciation to Ms Bresnan’s office for taking a very verbose intention on who has ultimate and supreme authority in this and bringing it into a concise, plain-English way of putting it. And I thank that office for that.
With respect to the new paragraph (3), there are a couple of words in there that actually give me hives. However, in the interests of honouring my word, in the interests of furthering the spirit of cooperation and wanting to move forward in partnership, with or without a parliamentary agreement—I think that we are all trying to achieve the same things—I am grateful to Ms Bresnan and her office and to Mr Coe for their time today. I have actually briefed both offices on where we are hoping to go—we have actually been doing things in the housing area for the last five years—and I hope that has been able to put an environment on it so that we are actually all trying to move forward in the right direction.
I have undertaken with the Greens and with Mr Coe that we will have a forum. We can call it a think-tank, we can call it a summit, we can call it a forum. We will have a gathering, a gathering of the minds, on these things which is, in effect, what was being asked for in paragraph (3)(a). We had intended to have a forum on the regulatory framework. We will now change that and include it as a significant item in the forum, because I do not think we can actually talk about community housing and its role without having that conversation about the regulatory framework.
One thing that I picked up was that there does not seem to be agreement on the definition of what community housing constitutes, what is affordable housing. Maybe there is a bit of both. That conversation may very well enable us to clear that up so that we have a common definition and are actually on the same page of the same book.
With respect to Mr Coe’s amendment, I thank him very much for giving it to us early enough for us to actually give it some thought. I cannot support it but I do wish you to understand that it is not just being bloody-minded. The original paragraph (2) that Ms Bresnan has put forward and that we supported is about the supreme authority. We have to work within the framework the federal government actually put down. We cannot put other restrictions on.
What I need to convey, even though we are not going to support the actual wording of the amendment, is that we do move forward in engaging with the community and with the experts in this area anyway. All of these things that Mr Coe has put down, his (a)(i) to (v), we are already doing and are quite happy to extend, as I indicated before, with both offices. I am quite happy to have my offices and me engaged so that we can move forward.
As I said before, this is about homelessness. This is about people in despair. This is not a political footy. We can talk about political footies in another area but when you are talking about someone who is living in the shrubbery just outside the Legislative
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .