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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-04-05 Daily Xml
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HOUSING SA

The Hon. J.S. LEE (16:00): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Social Housing a question about housing trust accommodation availability.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: Reported on ABC Radio on 23 March 2012, Julie Macdonald from the Housing Trust Tenants Association stated that the lack of housing trust accommodation availability is a common occurrence. She added, 'We hear stories all the time from single mums with children who are not being housed.' On 26 March, Alice Clarke, executive director of Shelter SA, confirmed on Radio Adelaide that there are 22,000 people waiting to be housed. She continued:

The reality is for people on category two and three they are never going to be housed; for the rest, who are on category one, there's about 2,000 or so people housed each year.

As a percentage, this equates to about nine per cent of housing applicants who are successful in receiving housing accommodation. Furthermore, the state Labor government is planning to sell 540 housing trust homes this financial year to raise approximately $100 million. My questions are:

1. How many of the public housing facilities are currently occupied?

2. Can the minister confirm whether there are 22,000 disadvantaged people currently on the social housing waiting list?

3. What measures will the minister undertake to reduce the waiting list for Housing SA applicants?

4. How will the government secure housing availability for disadvantaged tenants if it is constantly running down public housing stock?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Communities and Social Inclusion, Minister for Social Housing, Minister for Disabilities, Minister for Youth, Minister for Volunteers) (16:02): I am at a loss in some respects to know where to start with that question. It evidences, I think, a sad lack of understanding of the public housing sector in our state, but let me give you an attempt if I can. All Housing SA urban renewal projects are funded through the state budget, except for the Woodville West project, but the commonwealth is providing funds through the Nation Building—Economic Stimulus Plan.

Other current and recently completed renewal projects include areas such as The Parks, Westwood, Kilburn, Playford Alive, Hawkesbury Park, Northgate, Elizabeth Park, and there are several more. More than 5,400 housing outcomes have been created since these projects began. I acknowledge at the outset that we do, as a matter of policy, knock down old housing trust stock. There is a very good reason for that: they are old stock. They need to be renewed and they need to be refurbished.

The honourable member simply posits the question and then answers it as, 'Why do you do that?' It is because we want to create new housing trust stock. We want to create new and better housing trust stock to put our housing trust tenants in. Just keeping the old stock in place, trying to maintain old stock, is an never-ending cycle that just takes up more and more of Housing SA's money, which could potentially be invested in new housing stock.

That is what we are doing. We actually keep our stock and we renew it. Where we have old areas of housing trust stock, where we may have, say, 85 or even 90 per cent of housing trust owned stock, what we want to do these days, as opposed to the old days, is not to put in a new housing trust ghetto. We want to actually invest in mixed tenure, with mixed tenancies, so we have a different sort of community created.

No longer do we build in suburbs where we have 90 per cent of housing trust tenants moving in. We want to involve the private sector. We want to involve the not-for-profit, non-government sector, and we want to involve affordable housing outcomes in building entire new communities. That is what we do, and that is what we do through the Urban Renewal Authority, which is designed to do exactly that.

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