Page 2664 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 15 August 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
There are a lot of other issues that we raised, such as more money for mental health, funding education to deliver safe schools and improved school facilities and, as I mentioned, our public transport system. We will talk much more about that.
Importantly, there are investments in public housing, including housing our vulnerable Canberrans and addressing homelessness. While this was not all in this budget, by the time the public housing renewal strategy has been finished I understand that there will be a total of $600 million spent on new public housing. I think that is a very commendable investment and, unfortunately, a much needed investment in our community.
Another investment that is needed in our community is supporting the community legal centres and community groups. They support Canberrans by delivering a gender-inclusive agenda. There is also support, as I said, for the community legal centres as well as the Environmental Defenders Office. Of course, there are some areas where the Greens would go further and we have concerns in others.
Looking at this output class, starting with the positives, we are very pleased to see the projected return to surplus and the incredibly small—almost a rounding error I guess in a $5 billion budget—deficit of $10 million this year. The positive thing about this is that it gives us room in the future to invest in useful public infrastructure and to look at some of the issues that have been highlighted in terms of the revenue side of our budget.
One of the other things that we are very pleased about is community engagement. As everyone will know, the Greens have been talking about community engagement ever since we existed. We are very pleased to see that there is a specific allocation for deliberative democracy in this budget. We are looking at ways to improve this and making it go further. I anticipate talking more about that in this chamber.
One of the things we are very positive about is Access Canberra and what it intends to do with the increased building levy. The Greens, and I am sure other MLAs, have a continual stream of complaints about building policy issues in Canberra. This was my experience when I was here in the Seventh Assembly. I would have to say that nothing has changed in the Ninth Assembly. Possibly, things are worse. So we are really pleased about the building reform budget initiatives which are going to be funded out of the increase in the building levy.
The building audits, which will be a better building inspection program, have clearly been called for because clearly many building owners have financial losses and considerable loss in amenity due to building defects that are simply the result of non-compliance with the Building Act. Building certification reform was one of the Greens’ election commitments. What that is saying is that there will be a panel of independent auditors to conduct mandatory annual audits of certifiers.
There have been widespread concerns about the independence, efficiency and effectiveness of our current independent certifier system. By auditing the certifiers, we hope to give much more rigour to and much more confidence in this system. The other one is continuing to work on building regulation reform. This has been an
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video