Page 1977 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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we know that it is—well paid, highly educated and long living. But on the other side we have many people in lower paid jobs who are there providing services for us.
Along the housing continuum you start with homelessness at one end or at one part of the circle, however you want to depict it, and you move through that continuum to social housing, renting and home ownership. But it is not always a linear progression from one to the other. People can drop out of one and enter another at almost any time due to bad luck, bad decisions, bad health—a range of issues. And it can happen to anyone.
The problem we have in the ACT is that the gap between social housing and private rental is too big for many people to make the jump. It means that for most people who are either in homelessness or in social housing there is no exit from that homelessness or social housing. We see this year after year with the Anglicare national rental affordability snapshot. Year after year we hear that there were practically no affordable rental options found in Canberra or Queanbeyan for any of the low income household studies.
In our jurisdiction we do have quite a high number of public housing and community housing properties. Earlier, during question time, the Deputy Chief Minister informed us—and I think it is in her amendment as well—that we have 27 per 1,000 in public housing or community housing, and 25 per 1,000 in public housing. On a per capita basis, those are pretty good figures.
Why, then, do we still have 142 people classed as urgent waiting more than 195 days for public housing? Why, then, when we are doing so well for public housing, do we have 1,466 people classified as high needs who are waiting, on average, 802 days to be housed—802 days for well over 1,400 people?
It is one thing to say how well we are doing in the number of public housing properties, but what does that mean for the people of the ACT? What it means for the people of the ACT is that they are put at the bottom of the pile, time after time, by this government. That is what it means for the people of the ACT.
In a previous role that I held before I entered the Assembly, as the CEO of Homelessness Australia, a national peak body, I participated in a loose coalition of organisations that campaigned for affordable housing. It focused on people who are experiencing housing stress, which is defined as more than 30 per cent of your income on housing; or housing crisis, which is when you spend more than 50 per cent of your income on your housing. According to that campaign, childcare workers, electricians, accountants, hospitality workers, schoolteachers and many other occupations in Canberra are in housing stress. Cleaners, delivery drivers, checkout operators and many others are in housing crisis.
These are the people we see every day as we go about our business in Canberra. When we go to the bakery or the supermarket on our way home to get dinner, they are the people we see collecting the trolleys. These people are in housing stress or housing crisis. And what is this government doing about it? It does not care. It is assuring us that everything is okay and there is nothing to see here.
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