Page 2480 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 1 August 2018
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of jurisdictions, notably a large program in New South Wales. For those of you who are not into housing jargon, headlease means that the organisation, the community housing provider, has a lease with the person who actually owns the property but on-leases it to someone else, the low income earner. That is a headlease.
In Victoria there are two different government-backed headleasing programs: one for housing stock that will be rented to people who are at risk of or are leaving homelessness, the other for women escaping domestic violence. Both programs involve registered community housing providers. Likewise, the Tasmanian government have just announced a government-backed headleasing program to tackle their severe shortage of affordable housing.
The second call is on the government to provide a last-resort government rent guarantee for property investors to participate in the program. Similar guarantees have been operated in other jurisdictions where private stock is headleased by community housing providers, so again this is not particularly new or radical. Given the strong record of community housing providers whose regulation requires very low vacancy and arrears rates, I do not imagine that it is going to need to be used, but it is a component to build confidence among property investors.
The third call is to allow community housing providers to access rate rebates for properties where the tenants would be eligible for such a rebate if they were home owners. If an older person or a person with a disability who would be able to access rate rebates if they lived in their own house lives in a dwelling managed by a not-for-profit community housing provider, it seems to me only reasonable that the ACT government should extend the same consideration for the community housing provider as it would to the home owner if those people were fortunate enough to be home owners. I am aware of one community housing provider, ECHO, that spends 25 per cent of its budget on rates.
The result of this motion, if successful, will be a more equal treatment of properties from a land tax and rate point of view which will be based on how they are used, not so much on who owns them. If a community housing provider acquired more properties and rented them out to eligible tenants, they would not pay land tax. If they manage affordable rental from a private landlord, land tax is paid under the current rules. My motion would fix this inequality as well as the inequality between community housing tenants and low income home owners re rates.
These measures are not silver bullets; they are not by themselves going to solve our housing affordability crisis. They will, however, represent a very modest financial commitment from the government which has the potential to leverage a much more significant financial commitment from private landlords in the ACT. This is something that should be a win-win. To my mind, the only surprise is that we have not done this before.
The outcomes of this motion, assuming it is passed, will dovetail neatly with the operation of the affordable rental real estate management model, which should receive funding through the affordable housing innovation fund, part of the parliamentary agreement. I understand from comments made by the housing minister, reported in
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