Page 4381 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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That is one of the real tragedies of housing in the ACT. We have a considerable mismatch between housing demand and housing supply. The size of households is going down, but the existing houses are staying as they are. Admittedly much of our new housing is smaller, but overall we still have something of a mismatch.
The Greens, in terms of looking at solutions to housing stress, are looking at a multitude of solutions. One of them is public housing, which Ms Bresnan has talked about and Ms Burch has talked about. That is not what I am going to be talking about, although it is an important part of the solution.
I am going to be talking about some of the other things which are part of the solution. Let’s face it: even if the Greens are successful and we get 10 per cent of the ACT’s housing as public housing, that is not going to cover all the people who are low income people in the ACT. It is a major part of the solution, but it is not the whole of the solution.
Things that we would like to see include much better use of the housing stock. One of the things in the Green policies is house share schemes. We are all familiar with group houses; I expect many of us have lived in them—probably when we were younger but some of us may be now, for all I know. They are something which in Australian society tends to be largely the province of younger people. That is what uni students do, you could say.
But that does not have to be the case. As a resident in an older suburb, Downer, I can see a lot of households around me which are quite large physically. They were often extended for all the kids. We are now down to one person there. That one person there is having difficulties staying there. They are older—they are in their 70s, some of them in their 80s—and they are having difficulties with the physical issues of running and maintaining a house. But they have got lots of space. They have not necessarily got a lot of money; in fact most of them do not.
In other areas of Australia, we have had council-run schemes which match potential tenants with older house owners. You end up with a situation where you have low income accommodation for the younger person who is the tenant. It is particularly low income, because they will have a reduced rent in return for doing some housework, doing some shopping. They make the situation a lot safer for the older person who is staying there. It is a win-win situation. It is something that we can really do in the ACT.
Something else we need to look at in the ACT, and it is one where I am afraid I do not have such an easy solution, is the transaction costs of moving. Again, I am looking particularly at older women, or older people in general, who I talked about earlier. In many cases they would consider moving from a larger house to a smaller house, but the cost of the smaller house or the unit is such that by the time they have paid all the transaction costs to sell their older house which is in poor condition they will not get enough money to move into something more suitable. I do not know what the solution to this problem is, but we do need a solution.
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