Page 1376 - Week 04 - Thursday, 30 March 2017
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defined by our education. As we get older many of us feel as though we are defined by our occupations and what we really are. But one of the things that define us very clearly is where we live. For so many Canberrans, their home represents who they are.
When my mother brought me home from the York Hospital in the spring of 1966 she brought me home to a modest, bonded asbestos public house. 58 Grey Street in York was as basic a house as you could find in my home town but it was all that my parents could afford. We lived there for the first four years of my life. It became the launching pad for my parents as they grew their business to the point that they could eventually afford to purchase their own home. I think it is one of the many classic roles that affordable housing is supposed to play.
I thank Greens member Caroline Le Couteur for raising this and I am certainly more than happy for us to be devoting as much time as is humanly possible to talk about this in the chamber. I know we do ferociously debate things often in this chamber but I feel that on this particular issue there is a lot more that we have in common than we disagree on.
We are certainly serving our community so much better by talking about affordable housing than by wasting the hours that the other side have insisted on wasting talking about all manner of federal issues. I am dismayed at what those opposite try to do every single day. Every day they trot out these tired old lines suggesting that somehow we have got some ownership of decisions made by the federal government, our friends up on the hill, our colleagues over the lake, that everything they do up on the hill is seemingly our fault and we are to blame. I am just wondering if we may soon be blamed for decisions made by Donald Trump—maybe that is our fault as well—and Vladimir Putin. Who knows!
It is time that those on the other side grew up, stopped masquerading as the federal opposition and started to take responsibility for what former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope has declared is the biggest single regret of his time in office in this place. I have got a lot of time for Mr Stanhope as a representative of the people and as a man who genuinely tried to do the right thing by everyone. He has conceded with hand on heart that his biggest regret is not delivering affordable housing to more Canberrans than is the case now. Jon Stanhope said:
The affordable housing action plan, which I initiated in 2006, was not fully implemented at the time I left office in 2011 and has clearly still not been realised. This is despite all the levers for implementing the plan being in the hands of the ACT government. It is not only in the position of a monopoly owner of all the land for sale it also controls and operates the land planning and regulatory regime applying to its use and disposal.
The great Jon Stanhope suggests that those on the other side have the power to genuinely provide affordable housing for many more Canberrans than is the case now but they have failed. It is a great shame. What a great shame that so many young families have to carry the burden of years of inaction and what a shame that, as I mentioned yesterday in this place, many thousands of Canberra households on moderate incomes cannot get on the home ownership merry-go-round because it just keeps on going faster and faster and faster.
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