Page 263 - Week 01 - Thursday, 17 February 2011
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public housing and the supply of public housing—if we can address the housing affordability issues many of those issues will be solved.
Recommendation 6 in paragraph 6.37 talks about including a mix of one, two and three-bedroom dwellings in residential developments. Sometimes it will not be appropriate to have a mix of one, two and three-bedroom dwellings. I can think of properties around universities perhaps where you might want to just have studio apartments or you might want to have a different format for how people live. So I think we have to be very careful not to be too prescriptive about the make-up of particular sites. We need to make sure that on the whole we do have a good balance of housing types, but we should be very careful when we get overly prescriptive about individual properties.
Paragraph 7.20 of the report says:
The committee believes that more ambitious solar access targets should be included in the development controls.
Again I have concerns with this in that we need to ensure that we have a reasonable balance between yield, affordability and energy efficiency. If we too heavily commit to particular aspects of design, we run the risk of being worse off because we do not get that balance right between yield, affordability and energy efficiency.
Paragraph 7.33 states:
The Committee would like to see developments of five or more dwellings also be required to provide a per cent of dwellings which meet the relevant Australian Standard for Adaptable Housing and the Access and Mobility General Code.
I have disagreed with this comment because I do not believe that the committee did adequately look at these issues. In fact, I believe that in many of the comments in section 7 the committee are overstepping the mark. I do not think we had adequate information, whether it be from witnesses or from submissions, to make some of the comments that we made in section 7. I think the report in part was used to slide in some political comments, some comments from different political parties’ ideology, and I think that has resulted in this committee overstepping the mark and going beyond the scope of our report. So 7.33, in particular, I think is a bold statement, given we have just about no evidence whatsoever from witnesses or from the submissions we received.
I spoke earlier about public housing. Paragraph 8.46 states:
The Committee notes that it is important to maintain current levels of public housing in the inner north area.
I do not think we should be simply looking at the number of public housing dwellings; I think we should be looking at housing on the whole. We cannot be segmenting public housing or social housing from the rest of the housing stock. Does saying that we should have current levels of public housing mean we should not have more public housing? Does it mean we should have less public housing? What does it
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