Page 454 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 2018
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affluence, times our technology. I will not again go through this ecology 101 lesson that I went through last year. I am afraid that it is going to fall on deaf ears. There is only one new member, who possibly did not hear it, and she is not here right now. However, I just note that increased population and increased consumption do make it harder to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce probably every part of our environmental impact.
Turning to the housing element of the motion, people moving to the ACT need to have housing that is affordable and available. As I mentioned in this place yesterday, Canberra is experiencing an ongoing housing affordability crisis. A majority of people who move to Canberra, especially students or people taking up graduate positions in the public service, will start by renting. In recent weeks there has been considerable media coverage of the difficulties faced by people who have come to Canberra to work or study and found themselves faced by a very tight, and very expensive, rental market.
Mr Pettersson’s motion cites a number of dazzling statistics to illustrate the strength of the ACT’s economy. Unfortunately, despite all the new dwelling construction statistics, this construction activity has not done much to ease pressure on the ACT’s rental vacancy rate, which is currently sitting at a mere 1.3 per cent. The amount of social housing, as a proportion of total housing stock, has been falling for the past couple of decades.
Another issue with the supply of new housing is the type of supply. A study published last year by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute looked into housing supply in Australia. It stated:
Most of the growth in housing supply has been taking place in mid-to-high price segments, rather than low price segments. Unfortunately, we are not witnessing a trickle-down effect whereby households buying new housing free up vacancies in the established housing stock that housing stressed households are able to move into at lower prices and rents. Consequently, research studies confirm that low-income households continue to experience growing difficulties accessing low cost housing. Housing in low-priced segments is presumably more affordable, but less than 5 per cent of approvals were in the bottom 20 per cent of the house and unit real price distribution in 2005–06, and this remains the case almost a decade later in 2013–14. Hence, the housing supply issue is more nuanced than commonly thought, as there seems to be structural impediments to the trickle-down of new housing supply.
Thus, the economy may be performing strongly but it does not mean that the benefits are being shared equally. In the affordable housing space, the government needs to do more. The public and affordable housing targets for urban renewal and greenfield redevelopment sites, released on Monday by the City Renewal Authority and Suburban Land Agency, are not adequate to maintain the current rate of public and affordable housing, let alone increase it.
At a time when Canberra is growing and our economy is strong, we are in a good position to ask: what kind of future do we want for our city? The decisions we make now will determine the city we become. As we are growing quickly—reportedly at
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