Page 3080 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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tenants can often be noisy or potentially abusive. I acknowledge that there is probably only a fraction of the overall housing population that is doing this kind of behaviour, but it is that fraction that is giving everybody else a bad name. I do think that Housing ACT does need to do more to enforce the terms of tenancy so that innocent neighbours can have their peace and quiet and their livelihood upheld.
The majority of rental arrears continues to be written off as bad debt. This is simply not good enough. We need to make sure that the tenancy agreements we have in place are strongly adhered to. If you actually enforce the tenancy agreement, it is far more likely that you are going to have tenants who respect the agreement. They will then respect their house, and there will be a cultural shift.
If you go a bit lackadaisical on any particular area with the governance of public housing, you end up having a cultural change in the wrong direction. Everything has to be maintained, whether it be the standard of behaviour, the payment or the upkeep of the house. All have to be upheld, and all have to be upheld to a high standard so that we can have tenants who take pride in their house.
It is a privilege to live in public housing. Taxpayers are funding it. They are subsidising many people living in public housing. That is what taxpayers expect. Taxpayers expect that some of their money will go to subsidising people who cannot afford to live in their own accommodation. That said, there are rights and responsibilities for both the government and tenants.
I will touch on the overall position of the budget with regard to the Labor-Greens agreement. We have concerns with raising the level of public housing in the ACT to 10 per cent. To raise the level to 10 per cent would mean acquiring about 1,500 houses or perhaps knocking down lots of other houses in Canberra to reduce the overall level to make it 10 per cent more.
Mr Hargreaves: We could blow a suburb up or take a suburb out. Is that what you want?
MR COE: That is right. I am sure that if you took out Nicholls, Hall or something and gave it to New South Wales, you might get 10 per cent public housing or thereabouts. But I do think it is interesting to look at Mr Hargreaves’s media release of 22 June. He says:
Typically, the Greens answer to issues is to buy more. They would like to have 10% of all properties in Canberra in social housing hands. This would mean that to bring the stock to this percentage the community would have to find nearly $900 million. And then, pay for 10% of all properties constructed after that at a rate of over $400,000 per unit. And this doesn’t include the ongoing maintenance cost. These economics just don’t stack up.
Mr Hargreaves goes on to say:
The Greens will say that this can occur over time, but don’t say how much time and where the money will come from. How many teachers or nurses we can’t recruit, or how many capital projects can’t go ahead.
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