Page 96 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012

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economy. Whether they are building roads, prisons or dams, they have a consistent record of over cost and under delivery—the GDE, 10 years and two attempts in the making, and cost blow-outs from $53 million to somewhere around $194 million; the AMC declared open before it got its security system working—a feature, I would have thought, that was critical to effective management of a prison. Yet another is the Cotter Dam. What a typical Canberra headline the ABC led with when it ran this story last December:

The $363 million Cotter Dam expansion is unlikely to finish on time or within budget.

Not on time; not on budget—a real Canberra Labor Party slogan if ever there was one. And what of other services? We have a public transport system that is used less and costs more. We have hospitals with the longest waiting times in Australia. So when it comes to affordable housing in Canberra we should not be surprised that this Labor government has no more ability to deliver affordable housing than it has to deliver a road, a dam or a prison either on time or within budget.

How have successive Labor governments, in their 11 years of supposed management of the territory, addressed this issue? In their usual way. They write papers and form committees. They issue press releases and they form steering groups. I know that for some years that has been the approach in education matters. The government publishes a glossy brochure, forms a steering group, a project group, a consultative committee and publishes a report. End of effort; end of story. And so it has been in housing.

Former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope issued an affordable housing action plan in 2007, the work piece of an affordable housing steering group he formed a year earlier. Mr Stanhope chaired the group and its members came from various government departments. In the foreword Mr Stanhope said:

Access to affordable and appropriate housing is a basic right and the ACT Government has made upholding that right one of its highest priorities … Taking our relatively high incomes into account, our housing is usually rated as affordable, by national standards.

The committee received 19 submissions from various groups and individuals. Its key findings were that house prices and rents in Canberra are among the most affordable in the country. It went on to suggest the government’s strategy for the future should be, inter alia, to allow the housing market to operate as efficiently as possible through ensuring sufficient supply of land and stabilise house prices in a period of growth, and to maintain a planning and land release system that supports the delivery of an adequate supply of land and is responsive to changing demand.

So some time in the past five years a suggestion came to government that maybe there might be a housing affordability issue. But other than to do the usual—forming a committee and publishing a report—what have they done? A recent paper suggested that nearly 80 per cent of the plan’s recommendations have been delivered. If that is the case, perhaps it was a wasted effort. What has changed? Well, nothing for the


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