Page 1291 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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50 per cent and our population by only 41 per cent over that period. State and commonwealth governments contributed 24 per cent of that increase. Between 1961 and 1976 housing stock increased by a further 46 per cent, again, outstripping the 33 per cent increase in our population. And, again, state and commonwealth governments were 23 per cent of that increase. So governments in the past have put a high value on providing affordable housing, and for most of Canberra’s history, most of our housing stock was government supplied.
Unfortunately more recently we have seen a significant decline in government investment in housing. In Canberra public housing made up 12.4 per cent of our housing stock in 1991 just after self-government. By 2001 this had dropped to 12.2 per cent. Public housing now makes up only 7.1 per cent of our housing stock. Between 2010-11 and 2016-17 public housing stock numbers in the ACT decreased from 12,209 to 11,822, a drop of 387 houses. These figures come from the budget papers. While there have been some fluctuations year by year, the trend is downwards.
A recent letter to me from the housing minister highlights the problem. I wrote to her about this issue a month or so ago. She noted that public housing in the ACT is the most highly targeted in Australia with 99 per cent of allocations made to people in greatest need as against the national average of 74 per cent. This results in a high level of rental rebate—that was $142 million in 2016-17—which means a lower ability to cross-subsidise Housing ACT’s operations from its own-source revenue. This means that Housing ACT is going backwards financially.
Curtin University economist Alfred Dockery observed that since 1982 the role of public housing has changed from a tenure offering working families affordable housing opportunities to a residual sector that targets housing assistance for those with the greatest need. There has been a marked change with working age public housing renters increasingly driven from the ranks of those whose employment prospects are relatively poor. We have taken the public out of public housing, and it does not have to be that way. We have set priorities about what we choose to spend public money on—investment in social housing makes sense. It delivers abundant social and economic benefits to tenants and to the wider Canberra community and economy.
Unfortunately the immediate prospect for the future of public housing is not good. The Suburban Land Agency has identified 143 dwelling sites for public housing in 2017-18. During this period, however, 4,120 dwelling sites have been scheduled for release by the ACT government, and this means only 3.5 per cent of new housing stock will be public housing.
In response to this motion I anticipate the minister will tell the Assembly that social housing growth will not take place just in the dwelling sites identified in the housing targets of the CRA and the SLA. That, of course, is true. They will note that the rest of the portfolio is being rejigged and there has been added supply through spot purchases and so on. All of this may well be true, but it is still not enough. As I pointed out earlier, the overall numbers of social housing dwellings in the ACT are falling, as is the proportion of this stock against the overall number of dwellings in Canberra. The public housing capital delivery program is barely replacing the level of
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