Page 2299 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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What this motion today does is to build on the work that has been done in relation to the concessions scheme but say to this Assembly that these are not the only people who are in need in this community. For the most part, most people in the community would rather be able to fend for themselves—for the government to keep their hands out of their pocketbooks sufficiently so that they could look after their families themselves, so that they could buy a house or pay the rent to house their family, so that they could educate their children in a way that they saw fit, so that they could care for the health of their children and put food on the table in a way that they saw fit.
This is what families are for. Families are autonomous groups that are designed for the nurturing of the next generation. That is what they are for and they need a reasonable share of their income to do that. Mr Seselja used an example of a family on a combined income of essentially 1½ salaries, of $120,000 a year. That, in ACT terms, is not a high salary. By the time you pay for the essentials of life, you pay your taxes and you pay for everything, there is not very much left to pay for the ACT government. What goes by the board is a trip to the pictures or a meal out or an extra pair of shoes. You hope that the shoes do not wear out, or from time to time it is an excursion that you do not go on, and it is definitely a holiday that you do not take.
These are real, live issues not just for the 25,000 people, by Mr Corbell’s calculation in question time today, who are in receipt of concessions in the ACT, but for hundreds or thousands of other families who live in Giralang, who live in Macgregor, who live in Holt and who live in a whole lot of other, mainly outer suburbs and who are doing it tough. And they are doing it tough because the cost of their housing is going up and up.
They look at their children and think to themselves, “I could afford to get into housing but my children can’t.” I look at my children. I consider that my husband and I were blessed to have reasonably affordable access to housing when we married. But I look at my children 30 years on who, with good jobs and trades and degrees behind them, cannot aspire to homeownership. And that is a message which is being repeated time and time again.
What will happen with those people is that they will go somewhere else. They will end up choosing to live somewhere else, to move somewhere else, to work somewhere else, where housing is more affordable, where they have a chance of entering into the housing market. The ACT already has a skills shortage. Do we want to exacerbate it even further by having unaffordable housing? Mr Seselja dwelt at length on housing.
There are a few issues that I would like to address. It will come as no surprise, Mr Assistant Speaker, that I would like to deal with the question of water. I spoke last time that we dealt with this matter in relation to water and I tabled a graph and a table, and I seek leave to table an update of that here today.
Leave granted.
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