Page 5500 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010
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It must also be observed that many of these increases mentioned in the motion are subject to significant external factors—house prices, for example. There has been an Australia-wide boom in prices. That is good for those who own a home but is a significant policy challenge for governments. It is now up to them to provide affordable housing to those who need assistance. Electricity and water prices will rise significantly. What we need to do is position ourselves to be able to cope with those increases. There are no two ways about it—we have to shift to renewables in the energy area. Doing so early will reduce the long-term cost.
Yesterday we considered a scheme for housing affordability. The Greens presented an alternative, and we listened to all the evidence and presented a better option for more targeted assistance to those who really need it—those who are really experiencing non-discretionary difficulty. All governments should consider cost of living impacts. The Greens have fought for years for comprehensive triple-bottom-line analysis of policies so that we properly understand the full range of impacts of decisions that are made by government and in this place.
This should include a poverty impact analysis, but we should have a comprehensive understanding of the impact of our decisions on the most vulnerable in the community. That is why we have included the poverty impact analysis in our amendment that I will move soon. Significant work was done by the ACT Social Inclusion Board on poverty impact analysis and how to apply that. We believe that work should be moved forward and applied to significant programs and policies.
The ACT government often refers to the ACT as having high affordability in house prices and rents because the median mortgage or rent payment is thought to be less than 30 per cent of the median gross household income. The Greens believe such commentary to be incorrect and unrepresentative of the market, because having a high median income means that people earning lower incomes are further behind. This is evidenced on the ACT government’s website, measuring our progress. The Gini coefficient, or distribution of income for Canberra, is getting worse.
In addition, Canberra does not have the supply of low cost housing that other capital cities have, and this has been the situation for many, many decades. People on low incomes struggle in the high cost housing market. In the ACT, rents have risen over 10 per cent in the last year compared to the national average of 2.8 per cent and recent commentary on the market has signalled that rental prices here are likely to continue to increase. Those households that are either waiting to get into public housing or who just fall outside the eligibility criteria for public housing are doing it the toughest.
My amendment also calls on the government to recognise that the running costs associated with a house affect the affordability of that home. Rising energy costs mean that houses which are not energy efficient will have high energy bills that will hit household pockets and wallets.
We have been told that large families at risk of homelessness have been placed in houses which have enormous utility bills, and that the Chief Minister would choose to avoid solar access in pursuit of cheaper construction costs. We hope that would not be
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