House of Assembly: Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Contents

Housing SA Tenancies

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:02): My question is to the Minister for Social Housing. Can the minister confirm for the house in a previous answer that she will be rolling out this program to inform Housing SA residents about safe disposal of rubbish to other Housing SA sites?

The Hon. Z.L. BETTISON (Ramsay—Minister for Communities and Social Inclusion, Minister for Social Housing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Youth, Minister for Volunteers) (15:03): Let me be clear. We have 43,000 homes in Housing SA. If our tenants speak to us or on inspection we go and we see that rubbish and people dumping rubbish is an issue, I think it is our responsibility to work with the tenants and the local council to provide a clear facility. I realise that people are fixated on our solving an issue, but I think it is only the right thing for us to do when we work with our tenants.

Some of the rubbish was dumped by people who are not our tenants and my concern is that if one person dumps rubbish it is often a sight. We would all have different places in our electorate where sometimes people dump rubbish and we need to clear it up and we need to work out why people think it is okay to dump rubbish.

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. Z.L. BETTISON: The member for Bragg raises a very important point. What we have to work on here is the fact that there weren't individual bins for individual tenants and this seemed to cause an ability for people not to take responsibility for their own bin, so we worked with those tenants and we put up a special bin facility for that to happen. If the situation comes that there is rubbish strewn around an apartment block and the tenants would like our support and we think that is important, we will do that.

The SPEAKER: There were 40 opposition questions and four Dorothy Dixers, although it may have seemed more to the member for Unley. I call the Minister for Agriculture, who has an answer for us for the member for Chaffey's question.