Page 1350 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 6 May 2015
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people through the provision of public and community housing. This is not by accident. It is because successive governments in the ACT have known a fundamental truth about the people who live in our city. We are a community who care about the vulnerable, who include the vulnerable as valuable and contributing members to our social fabric and who expect our political leaders to put those values into action.
We provide housing for people most in need. Our housing plays a very important role in providing accommodation to the lowest 20 per cent of household incomes in the ACT. We also support tenants who have additional needs, and in each case our aim is to support people to sustain their tenancies. This is at the core of who we are as a city and a society. We recognise that vulnerable people contribute to the fabric of our society, and we are a city and a society that value that contribution.
I think most Canberrans would agree that we can measure the strength and success of our community by how we provide opportunities for our most vulnerable members. In fact, I do not think there is any higher test. And one of the ways we can support the most vulnerable people in our community is through providing good-quality housing. Unfortunately, public housing sometimes gets a bad name. People sometimes think it means higher crime rates, gangs and ghettos. This is incorrect and unfair.
Have a think for a moment about the people who might need the support that public housing provides. It might be a mother with her two young children who are affected by family violence and have nowhere else to go. It might be an elderly pensioner who has lived in the community all their life. It might be a young man with a disability who wants to live independently for the first time. It might be a family of refugees who have fled violence and instability and who are establishing a new family life in this great city. The profile of people in public housing is diverse.
Public housing is a fundamentally important part of our community. It provides stability and certainty to many members of the community when they need it most. It gives members of our community an opportunity to get on their feet. It may help them to get out of the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage and become contributing members of our society.
But public housing is not something we can set and forget. Canberra’s long history of public housing comes with a legacy: the oldest public housing portfolio in Australia. Much of our public housing was built quickly, to the standards of a different time, and it has reached the end of its life. I do not think anyone driving down Northbourne Avenue can look at our public housing stock there and say, “That is the standard I want to measure my community’s success by.” We can do better, and so we must do better.
Quite simply, much of our public housing stock does not match the needs of public housing tenants and applicants on the waiting list. These needs include improved security for women escaping domestic violence, the capacity for ageing in place for older tenants and adaptable and livable design for tenants with a disability. People living with a disability make up almost 40 per cent of our public housing tenants.
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