Page 4371 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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The combination of negative gearing tax breaks and capital gains tax exemptions has led to a situation where housing investors went from claiming a collective income of $700 million in 1998-99 to a collective loss of $6.5 billion in 2008-09.
The affordable housing coalition is also concerned about the limited availability of public housing and that it has not kept pace with population growth. The housing coalition believes we now have less low cost rental housing available in comparison to the past—and the shortage nationally is about 493,000 low cost rental properties. The report issued by the housing coalition states:
Solutions highlighted by industry commentators to increase first home owner grants, cut stamp duty and release land don’t address the fundamental underlying problems in our housing market. These solutions help people who make money from selling houses, they don’t improve the situation for those who live in them. At best they’ll provide a quick fix that doesn’t last long; at worst they drive up house prices even further.
In the Canberra Times on Tuesday, Ms Toohey, spokesperson for the affordable housing coalition, said:
The ACT housing system is failing too many people and successive government policy settings have contributed to this failure.
Since the Australians for Affordable Housing coalition was launched on Monday and their reports have been made public, I asked the ACT Minister for Economic Development if he supported the housing coalition’s findings about housing stress. The impression we have received from his responses in the chamber is that he does not agree that the ACT has the worst rates of housing stress for low income households in the nation. When the Greens asked on what basis he had come to this position, he said he relied on measures of housing affordability that came from organisations such as the Real Estate Institute. Herein lies the problem, because the Real Estate Institute focuses on measures of mean and average prices, rents and income.
Last week, for example, it was reported that, based on the Real Estate Institute figures, Canberra had the most affordable rent in the nation, as only 16.7 per cent of income was required in the June quarter to meet rent payments, well below the national average of 24.8 per cent. That is good for people in Canberra who have benefited from economic growth or have a strong and steady income. According to the statistics, if you are on the median income, you can afford housing in the nation’s capital. But if a person or a household earns a below-average income, Canberra can be a difficult place to live. I am surprised that the minister responsible for the affordable housing strategy was unwilling to accept this finding.
If the government are unwilling to accept the evidence, it seems unlikely that they will deliver a revised affordable housing strategy early next year that will effectively target the problems Canberra is facing.
The Greens recognise the housing stress that many low income families are under, which is why we set targets and programs associated with affordable housing into the
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