Page 5314 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2011
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realistic way of ensuring that they are provided for is through targeted assistance measures that we know will make it easier for those people who are struggling.
I also say that the Greens support the Chief Minister’s announcements that she is commissioning an expert panel to examine additional ways of supporting struggling Canberrans, along with the implementation of a range of ideas that were put forward at a recent community roundtable.
I would like to go through a number of particularly important areas of government assistance. The first one is housing. The first area we need to apply the principle of targeted assistance to is, of course, housing. Housing is a human right and we have an obligation to ensure that we can provide the community with adequate housing. It must also be recognised that there is a group in the community who just miss out on public housing due to their income and who are doing it particularly tough, to the point where they find it difficult to meet the 75 per cent of market rent charged in the community housing sector.
This in-between group should be the subject of additional assistance. This problem highlights the broader issue when providing assistance measures of the need to be very mindful of the criteria that are imposed and the interaction between the different assistance measures. Of course, the answer to this particular problem is to provide additional public housing so that we can adapt the current criteria to ensure that they match up with contemporary circumstances and housing initiatives so that no-one is left in severe housing stress that some in our community currently experience—in fact, quite a few.
I would just briefly like to observe that the general provision of assistance, such as non-means-tested blanket stamp duty exemptions, will not help. Rather, all the evidence suggests it will simply inflate house prices and help landowners, just as the first homeowners grant has. It is a discussion for another day, but this does raise the point that transaction-based taxes are not efficient. This was, of course, the conclusion of the Henry tax review. It is something which I hope the current Quinlan tax review will pick up on and I look forward to when it reports.
In the area of utilities, the Greens were very pleased with the government’s response on energy concessions in the last budget. My colleague Mr Rattenbury first raised this issue in a motion that was debated in March 2010 on the impact of energy price rises and climate change on low income families. That debate raised concerns about the impact of climate change policies and climate change itself on those who are most vulnerable in our community.
The Australian Council of Social Services suggests that there are three main reasons that this happens and at least two of them are highly relevant to low income Canberrans. The first is that low income earners spend a greater proportion of their total weekly household budget on energy and water, essential services for which prices are inelastic and for which price can be a blunt, regressive and unreliable tool for demand control. The second is that lower income households are currently less able to introduce measures to improve energy efficiency in terms of both capital improvements and updating their household appliances.
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