Page 3587 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 September 2019
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costs of living such as housing, food and transport. As the Australian Council of Social Service said recently, the reality for people on Newstart is that they are living in deep financial crisis, which severely restricts their chance of finding paid work. There is now overwhelming community support for an increase to Newstart, including from the Reserve Bank, the Business Council of Australia, John Howard and Barnaby Joyce.
While we acknowledge that it is difficult to adequately respond to the housing affordability crisis with limited federal government financial support, the ACT government needs to act as best it can. The good news is that housing has been getting some local government attention. The housing strategy provides a useful framework for action. The recent ACT budget funding for 200 new public housing dwellings over five years is a start on what is required, but it is only a start. At 40 houses a year, it is not enough.
Housing renewal, though, is positive. Newer dwellings can be both better designed for current public housing residents and more energy efficient, which reduces utility bills. By 2024 around 20 per cent of the public housing stock will have been renewed. It is worth noting, however, that, unfortunately, the investment of $1 billion in the 10 years to 2024 is largely coming from the sale of existing, well-located properties to fund new properties.
Through the parliamentary agreement the affordable housing target for land release has been expanded to include infill land release as well as community housing. I acknowledge that the government has responded to my criticism in previous years that affordable public and community housing was excluded from inner suburbs land release. This year even the first city to the lake land release includes affordable housing for sale and small amounts of community and public housing. This is very good.
I am most critical, though, of the limited growth in public housing stock. The ACT currently has around seven per cent of all dwellings as public housing. To maintain that we need to grow the public housing stock by roughly one dwelling a day. I acknowledge that this is difficult to do with the grossly inadequate federal government financial support. However, growth of 40 dwellings per year is far too little.
Mr Coe’s motion partly blames housing unaffordability on problems of land release and restrictive planning rules. This is very hard to justify if you look at national housing data, which shows synchronised surges and drops in housing prices in most capital cities including Canberra. Unless there is some secret agreement between state and territory ministers to simultaneously restrict land supply, the argument does not stack up.
Similarly, a couple of years ago when some lobby groups were arguing that there was a national shortage of dwellings, the most respected researchers in the field, at the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, found that there was actually an oversupply. There was just a mismatch of supply for demand. This does not mean that there is nothing that the ACT government should do. Our planning rules currently
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