Page 1153 - Week 03 - Thursday, 18 March 2010
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In this context, I am very pleased about the federal stimulus funding for public and community housing. It has certainly increased and I look forward to the completion of these new places. But we need to agree and commit to more in the future.
While the government strategy seems to be to release every piece of land possible, this is not actually going to solve the problem in the long run. Given how dependent the territory’s budget is on this land, the territory is never going to sell the land as cheaply as it would need to for some people to afford it.
In looking at land releases or housing in general, we need to look at a wider range than we have been looking at in the past. One I would like to suggest is co-housing. Co-housing is about 10 per cent of housing stock in Denmark. When I am talking about co-housing, it is a form of multiunit housing where there are shared facilities—the bottom-line things like shared laundries.
They usually have a common house and in that common house there will be some extra rooms so that you do not have to have a spare bedroom for when your aunt or uncle comes to stay. There is spare accommodation there. There is a workshop that all the guys, or the women if they want, can share. There will be a shared meeting space with a dining area so that the group can all get together socially, which leads to a much better community inclusion.
I am going to run out of time but one of the things I would also like to talk about is a recent relaxation in the rules which used to prohibit people having a second kitchen in their house unless it was actually made into two houses, which was usually impossible. I am aware that ACTPLA is currently reviewing what they call habitable suites and what the rest of us call granny flats.
I think this is an area where, with suitable policies, we probably could make, at comparatively little cost and social disruption, a difference to housing affordability and housing availability, because I am aware that particularly in our inner suburbs there is a lot of unutilised housing. There are a lot of houses which were big enough for the whole family. Now the family is down to one or two people. If those one or two people could reorganise the house a bit better they would probably be very happy to share the house.
That reorganisation may be another kitchen or it may be another bedroom but I think this is something which should be promoted. ACTPLA needs to do the policy work and promote it because the current situation is that, if you do create a secondary dwelling or habitable suite, it has to be turned back into your original dwelling if the person it was for leaves—for instance, if your grandmother finally moves to a nursing home or a disabled person has to move into another form of care.
I will just very briefly talk about some of the other issues. One of the issues for Canberra, of course, is the size of an average house. Australia is now officially building the largest new homes in the world. Of course, bigger houses cost more to build and more to run. Late last year CommSec released data showing that new homes in Australia are an average size of 214.6 square metres. In contrast, the United States,
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