Page 5460 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 8 December 2009
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and we have lost something of an opportunity in relation to continuing to meet issues on affordability as a result of a lack of capital in, most particularly, the unit development market.
As I say, we have released, in the last two years not counting this year, over 7,000. We have already released 2,000 in this financial year and I am hoping that by the end of the financial year we will have released 1,000 units for housing.
We have a number of significant partners in relation to what we are doing to address issues of affordability. I think central to the success that we have had has been the 15 per cent house and land package arrangement which we introduced 2½ to three years ago to ensure that within every greenfields estate 15 per cent of all housing provided would be house and land at $300,000. That has been successful and, indeed, one of the really pleasing aspects of our strategy has been the extent to which development and construction, particularly in the housing market, has embraced the initiatives the government has introduced.
I have done it before and I will do it again. Four of our developers have embraced this, none more willingly than Bob Winnel and the Village Building Co in relation to the massive rollout of affordable house and land packages, which has seen them produce, just in the last two years, somewhere in excess of 800 houses that can be described as affordable.
MR SPEAKER: Ms Porter, a supplementary question?
MS PORTER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Minister, can you tell the Assembly how Canberrans fare in relation to the proportion of their earnings needed to support home loan repayments or rent in comparison to other Australians?
MR STANHOPE: I am more than happy to do that in the context of affordability. It is about definitions, to some extent, and there is always some argy-bargy and some willing debate or conversation around exactly how we measure the most rigorous of the measures. The most objective is, of course, that employed by the Real Estate Institute of Australia, which is around the proportion of income required to support home loan repayments. When you think about it, it is the most objective, the most rigorous and the most transparent. And it is the measure which the Real Estate Institute of Australia employs.
It must always be accepted, of course, that there are within our community significant numbers of people currently in housing stress, finding it impossible or very difficult to access housing that meets their needs, or indeed struggling to enter the housing market. On the Real Estate Institute of Australia index, the proportion of weekly family income required to service a mortgage in the ACT in the September quarter of this year was 17.2 per cent, which was a reduction from 17.5 per cent in the June quarter. I think the most significant aspect of that, of course, is that that is against a national figure of 29 per cent.
I regret that I do not have the New South Wales figure available today. The ACT figure is 17.2 per cent. The national figure is 29 per cent and the New South Wales figure, in the context of our geographical location, perhaps the most pertinent to us, is
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