Speech in the ACT legislative Assembly
10 February 2010
MR COE (Ginninderra): It is disappointing again that the Canberra Liberals have had to highlight more inefficiencies with the ACT government’s management of our city. My particular interest, of course, with regard to the report is public housing. In the ACT we have got a number of issues in public housing which need to be addressed and a number of issues in public housing that have been highlighted in the report by the Productivity Commission. Despite the fact that we have higher costs than any other jurisdiction apart from the Northern Territory, even though this government calls it “investment”, we still have major problems with maintenance, major problems with antisocial behaviour, major problems in determining the future of multi-unit complexes and major problems with our relationship with community housing providers.
The key figure that I am going to be addressing today is one that Ms Burch pretty much skipped over, and that is the net recurrent cost of managing housing in the territory. The important figure here is the $7,736 per dwelling. She talked about capital cost, she talked about land value, she talked about having houses in metropolitan areas. That is all very well. But the recurrent cost is the cost that it takes for the department to manage each house. Here it is $7,736, higher than any state in Australia.
We do not have rural and regional areas that we have to subsidise. We do not have areas thousands of kilometres from our state capital, from our state housing headquarters, to subsidise. No, they are all within a 20-minute or half-an-hour drive, with perhaps the exception of Uriarra estate. Yet we still have the highest net recurrent cost of any state. Only the Northern Territory exceeds that. I think we would all understand the Northern Territory has some particularly unique issues that we do not necessarily face in the ACT to the same extent.
That $7,736 is $1,370 above the Australian average. The Australian average is $6,366 and here we have $7,736. There is a difference of $1,370. When you consider that, as of the last budget, we had 11,700 dwellings in the ACT, if you times that by $1,370, the cost per dwelling, we in the ACT are paying $16 million per year because we are not meeting the national average. And that national average includes the Northern Territory, which is more than double what the national average is. You have got an outlier there which is distorting the figures quite significantly. So if we were to deliver the national average, including the outlier of the Northern Territory, we would save $16 million in public housing.
We heard Ms Bresnan earlier talk about what would happen if we did not provide public housing, and she gave three or four different scenarios. What we can say categorically, rather than looking at hypotheticals about what would happen if we did not do something, is: how about we look at what is happening because of what we are doing? The fact is that we are driving people into public housing because we do not have enough housing in the ACT, and the housing we do have is too expensive. They are the real issues. It is not a matter of saying what would happen if we did not do public housing. It is what would happen if we did all the housing in the ACT properly and did not drive people into public housing in the first place.
We have the highest average of public housing houses in the country, about 8½ per cent. And we heard last year that the Greens want to increase that to 10 per cent. Rather than necessarily increasing public housing stock by 1½ per cent, why do we not increase all housing in the ACT by that percentage or whatever percentage may well be appropriate? I think if we increase the housing stock in the ACT, if we have a good, stable land release strategy, what we are going to have
It is interesting that those opposite, the Greens and Labor, both have this socialist utopia whereby public housing is the only answer for our housing woes. I do not accept that. I do not accept Ms Burch’s or Ms Bresnan’s rationale that the socialist answer is the right answer. What I think is the right answer is to avoid the problem before it actually occurs. A bit of prevention would not go astray. What I think we need is to make sure we have a good, stable land release strategy, a good strategy for housing affordability, so that people do not get forced into public housing in the first place. We know that for every person that goes into public housing, we have $7,736 of taxpayers’ dollars which need to go into it to subsidise it. Would it not be better if that problem did not arise in the first place?
Yet if you have a socialist world view, you would not agree with that. You would not agree with that because you would only say that increasing public housing stock as a percentage is the answer. And really what it comes down to is why the Labor Party do not want to deal with community housing providers—because they want a bigger empire. They want a bigger empire in Housing ACT that is controlled and managed by the ACT government. That is what they want. They do not like the idea that the private sector, the community sector, may be able to contribute to our housing problems in the ACT. They do not like to accept it.
I find it very hard to believe that the ACT government is seriously looking at these issues when it has a world view which, I think, is incompatible with the welfare of Canberrans. If you had an ACT government that had some ideas, had some strategy, was not as arrogant as to not even acknowledge that there is a housing problem in the ACT, maybe we would be in a situation that would actually suit more Canberra families.
Only the Canberra Liberals do have a strategy for bringing our housing difficulties under control, actually releasing land at a stable and constant rate so that the housing market can accurately predict what is going to be required and what the prices will be, what demand will be and what supply will be necessary in order to keep our market in equilibrium. What we have at the moment is an absolute disaster, and it is a great shame that so many Canberra families are driven into public housing by the ACT government, due to the gross mismanagement and inefficiencies of Housing ACT, stemming from the minister herself.
