Page 3369 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 19 August 2009
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I cannot reveal the details about that at the moment, but I can advise the Assembly that there are conversations going on which encompass the whole block and not just the site.
We need to look at the mixture there. This is not about selling it off so that rich people can move closer to the city. This is about addressing the needs of people. The way in which we put properties out there is to match people on the list. What is it about them? Do they need a specific structure built to take account of a physical disability? Do they need to have a property closer to the hospital, for example, because they need mental health services? The location is a big driver of that. There is the number of children and whether or not the children need a yard. The big thing that we notice lately is that the greatest call is for two-bedroom apartments, but we need to be mindful that kids need a yard to grow up in. We cannot just go from one set of stock to the other; we need to have a mixture.
I have to say that this particular part of the world has a very bad history. The reason why we got the people out of there in the first place was that some of the people who were living in the Currong apartments—some of the people were absolutely wonderful people; they really were—were having a really tough time because some of the people in there were not of that ilk.
Ms Hunter: I thought it was because the building was falling apart.
MR HARGREAVES: No. You have been reading my speech notes. The thing is that the building itself, the building fabric, was past its use-by date. You could argue the same thing for the Red Hill flats and for Illawarra Court in Belconnen. You could argue the same thing for the Gowrie and Stuart flats in Narrabundah. I would argue that you would be right there too.
We cannot just go and do the whole lot in one go; we just do not have the infrastructure in the ACT to cover that. We do need a strategy. I have asked the department to come up with such a strategy. Once that is done and the cabinet has ticked off on it, I will bring it back to the Assembly, put it in front of the Assembly and seek the Assembly’s input into that.
It is about us looking at addressing homelessness first up and addressing social disadvantage and not having pockets of it which regenerate themselves and feed off each other—and doing all of that in the context of a responsible approach to our environment here in the ACT, making sure that our carbon emissions are reduced, making sure that our footprint is reduced and making sure that the costs, funnily enough, to those very same people are reduced.
When it comes to multi-unit but not multistorey properties, we still have a roofline we can go to PVC on. We can still do that. We can still take advantage of the feed-in tariff. We can still start training people about how to use their homes. We can still start putting in nice curtains. They are environmentally responsible initiatives.
Whilst in general terms we agree with what the Greens are trying to do with this motion, we just do not believe that it should be concentrated on Currong and we are not going to go with any commitment to an eight-storey or multistorey building. We
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