Page 4522 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 26 November 2019
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All parties in the Assembly have been or will be lobbied by Havelock Housing. Members probably saw the article in the Canberra Times and we also discussed this in annual reports where Mr Wall had a fairly reasonable discussion about whether you can actually build affordable housing using the land offered by the ACT government. Havelock Housing are suggesting that it is problematic and Mr Wall’s analysis in annual reports also suggested that it was problematic given the price at which the ACT government is selling land.
I am very pleased to see that we have now basically expended the affordable housing innovation fund. I am disappointed that the minister did not mention in her statement that this was part of the parliamentary agreement with the Greens. I am particularly pleased that some of that money is now going to the development of a home share model. We have been pushing for that a long time. If we are to solve our housing affordability problem we are not going to do it all by constructing new buildings at huge cost. We have to, among other things, make better use of our existing housing stock.
Home share is designed so that people who have larger houses and who are not in the usual younger people’s share house market have a way to find a tenant who will work for them. It quite often will be an older woman in what was the family house but where the family have left and her husband has died. She will have a lot of space but she is not in the sort of share house market and will need a bit of help finding a tenant who will work for her. That tenancy can be on a very affordable basis because the older woman will quite possibly want someone to do the lawn mowing, help to do the heavy shopping and just be around so that if she falls someone will notice.
These schemes have been set up for disabled home owners and they have been popular in other parts of Australia and internationally. I am very pleased that this seems finally to be happening in the ACT; I just hope that it has been adequately funded so that it will not be another thing where we do a trial, we do not do it properly and then decide that it is not going to work and give up.
I note that part of the funding is $1.9 million for a service to support older women who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless through the YWCA. The service is known as Next Door. It sounds really good, but the sad thing is that it provides zero new beds. It is really great to support these women but they actually want and need somewhere to stay that they can afford. A similar scheme is being run for about the same amount of money via MARSS. Again, it is a great scheme except no money for beds. I am very pleased that we have a new scheme to support 20 individuals with high and complex needs who are sleeping rough into permanent housing.
It is good to see that the government is looking at the housing first approach, and I think we need to look at that more rather than just saying, “Oh, we’re providing supports.” Yes, that is better than nothing I guess, but I am not totally sure given the cost of some of it.
On the subject of cost, I draw the government’s attention to the motion brought forward by my colleague Shane Rattenbury that was passed last Assembly about working out the costs of having homeless people in the ACT and whether from an
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