Page 3195 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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doubt those tenants in substandard public housing will welcome the prospect of a new home in compensation for the lack of responsiveness in providing timely maintenance.
I am pleased to see that there has been some movement on the second Common Ground project in Dickson. I and the Canberra Liberals are fully supportive of this project. We need to do more for front-line homelessness services. The provision of a second Common Ground site is a good start, although I have often pondered, as has Ms Le Couteur, about the prospect of some movement on the original site and whether perhaps that could have been more cost-effective. We will be watching very closely how this progresses.
The decisions on placement of new public housing properties will be crucial to implementation. We hope that community consultation in this area will be timely, responsive and effective.
Building new dwellings is far from a holistic policy response. It can never be so when in parallel the government pursues debilitating revenue policies that escalate the cost of living in Canberra to unaffordable levels for quite large groups of people. As much as we might strive for innovative strategies to create affordable housing and public housing, these will never stem the problem. For many Canberrans unable to earn enough to keep up with the ever-increasing cost of living in Canberra, the hope of a comfortable living experience is a challenging and elusive one. They cannot stem this problem because property taxes, including all sorts of things—LVC, residential tenancy legislation, land supply policies, a ballooning list of levies—make the aspiration of affordable housing as elusive as ever.
No matter how hard this government tries to address homelessness, its taxation and its residential tenancy policies will drive people into rental stress and, potentially, eventually onto our streets. Ultimately these policies are a large influence on housing affordability and, by extension, the high demand on public housing in this town. More can be done in this space, and more must be done if we want to see fewer Canberrans in housing stress or on the street and more Canberrans with a roof over their head, which ultimately is what we all want.
Managing the provision of social housing services is a daunting and complex task. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who sit on the front line dealing with the issues of homelessness across our community, because they do a fine job. Make no mistake: it is not an easy job at all. It takes great patience, it takes sympathy and it takes persistence to deal with the many issues that arise along the way. While it is not an easy job, it is an absolutely essential job and one that must be performed to ensure that the homeless in our community, or those threatened with homelessness, are able to have a ray of hope. I cannot help but think about what our public housing system would be like without these people. Time and time again I have come across people in terrible circumstances unable to find housing, and they are ultimately, in most cases, rescued by the staff in the social housing system, by staff in Housing ACT or by the magnificent efforts of staff in community and charitable organisations. I cannot emphasise enough how important that grassroots coalface work is.
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