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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-06-05 Daily Xml
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Motions

Housing Trust Tenants Association

Debate resumed.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (12:30): I will be reasonably brief, but there are a couple of matters that I do think need to be put on the record. Last year, this house considered legislation which would put some limits on the parties' campaigning. We debated legislation which would cap the funding that parties could expend across the electorate and in individual electorates.

The campaign that was run by the Housing Trust Tenants Association highlights the problem with trying to tidy up election campaigns. I think any casual observer would know straight-up that the Housing Trust Tenants Association is basically a front for the Labor Party. How do we curtail the activities of a party in a campaign sense when they can simply get some bogus third party under some bogus name to go out and do their dirty work for them? There is no doubt that that is what has occurred here, and a number of campaigns over the years have been run in a similar fashion.

I make the point that while this parliament has sought to tidy up election campaigns—and I note the Deputy Premier introduced legislation yesterday to establish a standing committee of the parliament to look into these matters—I think it has got Buckley's. It has got Buckley's when we see member after member of the government get up and defend the actions of one Julie Macdonald; I think it is instructive of where that person and the Housing Trust Tenants Association are coming from.

The most confronting fact in this whole matter is the one of the supply of names and addresses. It is a fact that the Housing Trust Tenants Association obtained information that could only have been obtained illegally—that is an undisputable fact. I think it is important that at a committee of the parliament, whether it be the one that the Deputy Premier would have us establish or the one that is being established in the other place, people like Julie Macdonald are called before those committees so that we can establish where indeed that information came from. It goes to the very heart of accountability of government and of Public Service operatives, and it goes to corruption; it is a very important matter.

The matter of people using innuendo, half-truths and downright lies in political campaigns is something that has been with us for a long, long time. It is something, I hasten to add, that the Labor Party has been very, very adept at utilising. It is something which the Liberal Party refrains from, maybe to its own disadvantage. Like other members, I am proud that we refrain from that. I am proud that we are a party of honesty. I am proud that we put what we believe in before the people of South Australia, and I am damn proud that most of the people of South Australia agree with us.

The other reality is that it was the Liberal Party in this state that built the public housing sector we have now. It was the Liberal Party that built the Housing Trust of South Australia, it was the Liberal Party and the foresight of the Liberal Party that saw that we had such a huge stock of public housing in this state, and the Liberal Party is very proud of that record. The Liberal Party has never taken to an election a policy where we would destroy that. The Labor Party continues to try to argue that the Liberal Party does not have a heart. The reality is the Liberal Party has a huge heart, history shows that, and we are very proud of that, just as we are very proud that we play clean.

I am very concerned that a purported organisation such as the Housing Trust Tenants Association has been able to obtain the dataset that it obviously did obtain and used, and I am also concerned that having done that—and I say categorically they could have only obtained that illegally, in my opinion—they then used that, as other members from this side have said, to scare vulnerable people. That is a very low act, and anybody associated with that act should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (12:36): I rise to support the motion before the house and condemn the Housing Trust Tenants Association for their despicable scare campaign and misleading and deceptive conduct during the March 2014 election. Any member of parliament who assisted the Housing Trust Tenants Association in this campaign should stand up and apologise to the thousands of South Australians who may have experienced distress as a result of this disgraceful campaign.

The scare tactics used by the Housing Trust Tenants Association Assistant Secretary, Julie Macdonald, are absolutely disgraceful. I will add that both the association is affiliated with the ALP and Ms Macdonald is a declared member of the ALP. These actions have politicised an association that should be there to support Housing Trust tenants, not induce stress and fear in their own members and non-members for no warranted reason other than to assist the ALP's campaign.

Housing Trust tenants in my electorate received these letters and my office received many calls and emails from people not only within my electorate but statewide—people who were scared for their future or that of their loved ones, people who did not want to believe the horrid words expressed by the Housing Trust Tenants Association but had to be certain it was not true. Those calls then turned to anger towards the Housing Trust Tenants Association when the lies were dispelled.

People were downright outraged that Julie Macdonald and the association would stoop so low. One person even told my staff he felt he may have to take his wife to hospital as she was so stressed about the situation that she was experiencing heart pains. This was an act that affected people's health and wellbeing and induced unnecessary fear and left people confused and angered by the association's actions. I quote the words of one of my constituents: 'The association is a thoroughly discredited organisation.' These words are now most certainly true.

This was a campaign based on conjecture and fear. Julie Macdonald does not even register the harm she has caused. She merely felt it was necessary. I ask: was it necessary to instil fear in this manner? Was it necessary to cause the wider community great distress? Was it necessary to put people's health at risk? The answer should definitely be no.

The campaign against the Liberals did not stop, even when my colleague and shadow minister Duncan McFetridge spoke out against the lies and clarified the Liberals' position in South Australia, that none of the things that Julie Macdonald had stated were correct. Julie Macdonald continued her campaign through the association right up until the day of the election. What grounds did she have for these lies after it was publicly confirmed this was not the Liberals' position?

The other point that bugs me about this fear campaign are the words of Julie Macdonald quoted in the media: 'We've got the help of some members of the Labor Party.' Is this how the association accessed the names and addresses of the Housing SA tenants, some who were members and many who were not members of the association?

My office contacted each council in the electorate and was informed by staff at the Adelaide City Council that no-one had requested the list of the Housing SA properties prior to us. We were the first to contact them regarding the matter. If they did not access the tenants' details through the council's database, how did they get their details?

My constituents were outraged that an association such as this, delivering such a vile and false message, could have access to their personal information when they were not members of this association. I ask: what will they do with that information next? I condemn Julie Macdonald and the Housing Trust Tenants Association for their despicable scare campaign and call on those opposite to stand up and apologise if they played a part in this.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (12:41): I rise to support the member for Morphett's motion. I think it is a very important motion that raises many points. I would like to start by pointing out that this is a motion actually about the Housing Trust Tenants Association and is certainly not about Housing SA, and that, of course, is a very important distinction.

Our two electorate offices work very closely with Housing SA and actually get great service from them. I really would like to point out how helpful Mr Chris Kennett in Port Augusta and Ms Liz Malcolm in Port Pirie are. Between them they cover the majority of our area. They move around a fair bit. I think Ms Malcolm is often off on other duties and Mr Kennett often covers the Port Pirie office in the Yorke and Mid North region. Nonetheless, they really do an outstanding job trying to help my constituents and their clients (if that is the right word) in Housing SA properties.

In fact, they really went above and beyond their duties by volunteering an enormous amount of their own personal time and their own professional capacity during the Bangor fire, helping with regard to the emergency response unit that was set up in Port Pirie, and a significant amount of time and effort was spent in Wirrabara as well, trying to help people who had been displaced in many ways. That might have been because their house burned down or it might have been through needing some sort of counselling. They really do an outstanding job.

That is completely different from the Housing Trust Tenants Association. I do not believe I have ever met Ms Julie Macdonald. I do not believe that I know her at all. However, the things I have been made aware of about her concern me enormously. I wonder really whether it is even fair to call it the Housing Trust Tenants Association. They probably have that name registered somewhere, but there do not seem to be an enormous number of Housing Trust tenants who have a great deal of faith in this association or what Ms Julie Macdonald is purporting to do on their behalf and seemingly doing on behalf of the South Australian Labor Party.

This motion really is about misleading and deceptive conduct, and I do not think there is much doubt that that is what happened here. I do not think there is much doubt that there are two key issues here. One is deceptive conduct potentially with regard to the Privacy Act. As many speakers before me have said, nobody really knows from where the tenants' names and addresses were sourced, but nobody really believes that they could have been used without having been sourced from a government source one way or the other. The practical reality of trying to do all be back-matching would have prevented Julie Macdonald, and even a reasonably large band of helpers, from matching them all up. I guess we will really never know whether that was the case or not, but it does seem very improbable that those documents were not sourced from somewhere inappropriate, and that is very alarming in itself.

The other thing of course that is particularly alarming is the fact that we feel we were very badly misrepresented by the information that was sent out. I can tell you that my constituents, the constituents who have raised this with me, feel that we were very badly misrepresented as well. Constituents in Port Augusta, for example, have a regular meeting at the Port Augusta senior citizens hall, many of them are Housing SA tenants and they were really worried.

The member for Hammond talked about a lady coming to his office and being physically scared and physically affected by this. There was a meeting in Port Augusta, one of their weekly meetings in the lead-up to the election, where a group of elderly people were really, really worried. They were concerned that they were going to get kicked out of their homes, and of course that was never the case. I think it would be much more helpful if the Housing Trust Tenants Association wanted to deal with some of the real issues that affect Housing SA tenants, some of the real issues like dealing with dreadfully disruptive tenants, as I know happens all over the state and as I know happens in Port Augusta a lot.

I think the Housing Trust Tenants Association should be lobbying for a much stronger stance from the government with regard to disruptive tenants. That is not because I want disruptive tenants and, presumably, bad people to be kicked out in the street and left destitute and homeless, it is not that at all. It is because they are not taking proper advantage of the privilege that public housing is—they are not taking advantage of the privilege that public housing is. When there is such a significant waiting list then why not replace disruptive, inappropriate tenants with potentially positive and good tenants for the benefit of everybody? If someone is going to miss out, if someone needs to be on the waiting list, let it be the people with a proven track record of being disruptive, unruly and, essentially, obstructing the whole privilege that is public housing.

The issue of water meters is one that the Housing Trust Tenants Association could take up on behalf of its members, if it wanted to. There are enormous numbers of constituents in my electorate who still have shared water meters. I understand the reality with regard to the cost of replacing water meters, but the impact on some of the tenants is just dreadful. There are situations where you might have two, five, 10 or 15 units sharing the same water meter.

I understand they get a 30 per cent discount on their bill but that is often overcome if you have one tenant sharing the water in their property with an enormous number, like maybe 15 or 20 people, all coming through and using the water. So then all of the other tenants, who are trying to be responsible, have to pay their share of that and they actually end up paying more than they would if they did not get the 30 per cent discount. I think as the price of water goes up and up and up the cost of replacing the meter will become more and more affordable. So, I think that is something Ms Julie Macdonald could concentrate on.

The fact that we have so many vacant Housing SA properties around the state and such a long waiting list is something that could be dealt with. I think the maintenance arrangements that are in place are something that could be dealt with. The government, a year or so ago, tried to set up a situation whereby contractors had to be preferred contractors for certain regional areas but they could not recover their travel costs in the bills they put forward for, essentially, fixed price maintenance.

So in an electorate like Stuart, where you have housing properties that are well away from regional centres where most contractors are based, that presents a very significant difficulty. It presents a significant difficulty for the contractor to try to win business and stay afloat, it makes it very significantly difficult for the good people trying to run Housing SA offices and services in the region when they cannot get contractors very willing to do the work and, of course, it is no good for the tenants either. They are trying to get their property improved, they are trying to get their property maintained, but without a good supply of building contractors.

Mr Speaker, I recommend those as just some of the issues that the Housing Trust Tenants Association should be focusing on and not, as the member for Morphett says, trying to run deceptive scare campaigns, not accessing information which seemingly has been accessed completely inappropriately—it does not seem possible that it would have come from any other source in a very practical sense; it would not have come from any legal source, in a practical sense—and not misrepresenting one political party. This association should be completely apolitical and trying only to support the tenants who live in these homes.

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (12:51): I rise to support some of the comments made by the Minister for Education, the member for Taylor, the member for Little Para and others who have been commenting on this motion put forward by the opposition, which is really yet another attempt to come in here and argue against the election result. I think we are going to see more and more of these motions over the next four years. Really, when it comes down to this particular motion—

Mr Knoll interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Schubert is called to order for interjecting out of his seat.

Mr PICTON: It is a motion where there is a proper process if you want to complain about the election material that is distributed during the campaign. It is in the Electoral Act; anyone is able to go to the Electoral Commissioner and make a complaint. From what we have heard in this debate, that did not happen in this instance with this material, so members are now using the time of parliament. We could be talking about important measures such as the cuts from Canberra to health and education services; instead we are going over this old terrain of the last election, when they did not even bother to make a complaint about this issue.

While I have been listening to members I have had a look at some of the material that the Housing Trust Tenants Association distributed, and what is apparent from that is that they are actually referring to comments made by the Liberal Party in the 2010 election. They are alerting their members, and tenants who live in Housing Trust houses, of comments made by the Liberal Party in their 'Strengthening Communities through Affordable Housing' document in 2010. You can see the beaming picture of the member for Heysen at the front of it, the member who is now accusing the Electoral Commissioner of corruption. She says, in this document, that 'The state Liberal Party strives to support South Australians to transition to private rental'.

That is really what had concerned the Housing Trust Tenants Association, because they have heard this all before. People in public housing in Queensland, in New South Wales and in the United Kingdom have been promised by conservative governments that they would not be affected by Tories coming into office. Yet what they have seen, in all those jurisdictions, is a bedroom tax that was not promised before the election but that has been brought in. Members opposite talk about the stress that has been caused to public housing tenants; let me tell you, when there is a new tax being brought in to some of the lowest income people in our society about the houses they have been in for a significant amount of time, that really does cause some stress.

I would like to refer to a quick search of some of the commentary that has occurred in New South Wales since the minister there, Pru Goward, brought in a bedroom tax. You can see comments from people like Warren Wheeler from the Illawarra and South Coast Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service, who said to the ABC that the tax will add pressure to already struggling individuals. He said:

For some people a spare bedroom is a necessity…They can be crucial for those families and social networks. You might have grandparents who look after grandchildren when their parents go out and work, you might have adult children returning to the home after a relationship breakdown.

You also see in the UK where this has been brought in a huge outcry from those tenants in public housing, where the ABC has also reported that the measure will affect London woman Janet Cavalla, who does not agree with it at all. She said:

Because I've got a two bedroom flat and my son's left home and he's sick and has got to come back home.

She continues:

And he has to stay with me when he's sick and they're telling me I've got to pay…He's got cystic fibrosis. He has to have oxygen in a room without anyone else being in it because it will affect him so I don't believe in it.

This is the sort of stress that is being caused to people in the UK, in Queensland and in New South Wales, brought in by Liberal and Conservative governments in those states. That is what the Housing Trust Tenants Association in their material sent to Housing Trust tenants is trying to prevent happening in South Australia.

The policy document that was put out by the Liberals in 2010 has given them the impression that this is exactly what the Liberal Party would do if they were to ever form government again in South Australia. I think it is disgraceful that the Liberal Party is using the time in this chamber to criticise an association for going about the business of advocating on behalf of their members.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (12:55): During my respite from the pressures of this place I have had some time to consider some of the points that have been made by the government. However, let me just start again by reading a quote from Shelter SA's press release headed Fear Factor Not Justified:

A discredited Adelaide lobby group is frightening vulnerable Housing SA tenants by writing to them and striking fear into their hearts about losing their homes, leading up to the South Australian election. Shelter SA, the peak body for housing in SA, is appalled, Executive Director Dr Alice Clark said today 'any group who is prepared to scaremonger pensioners and people with disabilities should be ashamed'.

I want to know who funded this campaign and who provided the names and addresses. I am absolutely appalled, as a member of this place, to see that members on the other side have been supporting the intent of this campaign, and that was to go out there and scare people and make them think that the Liberal Party was going to do what people in the UK and what people in the eastern states had done.

This is a desperate attempt by the Labor Party, another dirty trick. They should be ashamed. If they do not vote to support this motion they will stand condemned.

The house divided on the motion:

Ayes 22

Noes 21

Majority 1

AYES
Bell, T.S. Brock, G.G. Chapman, V.A.
Gardner, J.A.W. Goldsworthy, R.M. Griffiths, S.P.
Hamilton-Smith, M.L.J. Knoll, S.K. Marshall, S.S.
McFetridge, D. (teller) Pederick, A.S. Pengilly, M.R.
Pisoni, D.G. Redmond, I.M. Sanderson, R.
Speirs, D. Tarzia, V.A. Treloar, P.A.
van Holst Pellekaan, D.C. Whetstone, T.J. Williams, M.R.
Wingard, C.
NOES
Bedford, F.E. Bignell, L.W.K. Caica, P.
Close, S.E. Digance, A.F.C. Gee, J.P.
Hildyard, K. Hughes, E.J. Kenyon, T.R. (teller)
Key, S.W. Koutsantonis, A. Mullighan, S.C.
Odenwalder, L.K. Piccolo, A. Picton, C.J.
Rankine, J.M. Rau, J.R. Snelling, J.J.
Vlahos, L.A. Weatherill, J.W. Wortley, D.

Majority of 1 for the ayes.

Motion thus carried.

[Sitting suspended from 13:04 to 14:00]

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