Page 544 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 17 February 2016
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be able to get a public housing property or to transfer. As we also know and we have discussed in this place, those public housing waiting lists and transfer lists do not tell the full story because there is another list that exists. It is about the out-of-turn transfers or the management-initiated transfers, which is where the government is hiding away those tenants in the Northbourne Avenue corridor that they need to move out in order to demolish those dwellings. What that means once more is that those people who may have been on the public housing waiting list for years will be waiting even longer because there are thousands of residents who need to vacate the Northbourne Avenue corridor.
There are some other important statistics in the 2016 report on government services that was released in January. For example, it shows that in 2014-15 the ACT had the highest percentage of clients with unmet need for accommodation services in Australia. We all know that the ACT has a large number of public housing properties. No-one disputes that, and I do not think anyone disputes the historical reasons why that is the case. Given that we have such a high level of public housing, it is disturbing to me, and hopefully to other members of this place, that we also have the highest level of unmet need for accommodation services. The chapter also shows that in 2014-15 the ACT had the lowest percentage of clients who were provided with accommodation or accommodation-related assistance.
On top of that, the homelessness services chapter also shows the ACT had the highest recurrent cost per client accessing homelessness services in 2014-15 in Australia. Let us try to unpick that a little. What that means is that we spend quite a lot on those clients, and that is a good thing. No-one is disputing that. But when we are spending the most per client and the second highest per head of population on our homelessness services, why then do we have the lowest percentage of clients provided with accommodation or accommodation-related assistance? Why then do we have the highest percentage of clients with unmet need?
We are spending a lot of money—in itself, not a bad thing—but where are the results? We are spending money and we are getting the worst results in Australia. It simply does not stack up. It is perplexing; it is disturbing; and for many ACT residents it is their day-to-day life which is impacted. It is not just statistics; it is not just talking about the budget and waiting lists in this place; it is about people’s lives out there every day. That is what we need to be focusing on. Are we getting the best result for the money that we are spending? The report on government services 2016 would imply that we are not.
As at 1 February this year there were 2,106 applications on the ACT public housing waiting list and 799 applications on the ACT public housing transfer list. I have had letters from people who want to downsize, for example, and have been unable to be downsized. I have had letters from people in desperate situations wanting to transfer, to go back to their community, and their transfer applications cannot be fulfilled. What this means, if you add these numbers up, is that there are going to be more than 2,106 people on the public housing waiting list and more than 799 applications on the public housing transfer list because we also have that out-of-turn or management-initiated transfer list, which people are put on pretty much only on the day a house is made available.
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