Affordable Housing

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:53): My question is to the Minister for Housing. Has the minister made any changes to the current rules around affordable rental housing eligibility? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TELFER: On 18 March, the opposition asked the minister if he would review the rules around rental housing affordability in light of the case of Miss Jakki Abernatt. Jakki is a 62-year-old single woman who is currently paying 60 per cent of her income in the private rental market. However, she is ineligible for affordable rental housing provided by community housing providers because of the current rule which states that to be eligible you cannot pay more than 30 per cent of your income in rent.

The Hon. N.D. CHAMPION (Taylor—Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Minister for Housing Infrastructure, Minister for Planning) (14:54): No, I haven't. These rules were established a long time ago. They come, believe it or not, off the Canadian standards. They applied for the entire time you were in government and they applied prior to the Marshall government during the Weatherill government as well.

What they are designed to do is to basically make sure that family accommodation goes to families. That is essentially what they are operating to do. That can be perceived in a certain way by single people like Jakki. I feel for her and her circumstances, but in this case, if we were to change the rules, as the opposition seems to want us to do, that would result in family homes, three-bedroom homes, going to single occupants, which I don't think would be a very good outcome for community housing or for the like.

So the answer is that basically these rules were applied for a long time and for a good reason. We want to provide housing for people. That is one of the reasons why we are building 100 affordable rental apartments at Prospect—which I think is the suburb where the opposition did their press conference—and of course that is one of many projects in a massive supply of housing. We are happy to talk about it all day, every day if you want. If you want to go down to Prospect, if you want to go down to Seaton, if you want to go down to Noarlunga, and if you want to go to Playford Alive, you can go and see civil works being done, you can see slabs going in and you can see housing being constructed.

Of course it's important to have housing at every end of the continuum; that is one of the reasons why we are pumping in housing through the SHAP program to community housing providers and to public housing. There are any number of projects around. These rules are important and they are established for a reason. Of course, I do think we could explain the reasons behind them better; I think they could be expressed better on the various community housing websites. But the formula and the way and the reasons why it's constructed in that way are all sound.