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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-30 Daily Xml
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Public Housing

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS (15:11): And I have a supplementary: will the minister commit to building more housing, or at least stop selling public housing, to meet the demand or is it the case that she believes more public housing is not the answer?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:11): That's leading with a glass jaw. This is coming from the party that, under the 'leadership'—if I can use that term—of former treasure Tom Koutsantonis, was into wholesale flogging of the South Australian public Housing Trust assets. Even the 1000 Homes in 1000 Days program was but a slogan in that it was not 1,000 additional properties but 1,000 rebuilt properties, and the way that was funded was to sell existing Housing Trust properties. It potentially ended up with a net loss. We have a sales and viability program which is continuing—

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: It is a continuing program, and it is in the forward estimates from the Labor Party's years in office.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: No; we're not doing worse. We are doing better.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: In Labor's time in office the sales and viability program was running at 500 properties per annum. This is the party that claims to care about—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: —people who are underprivileged, yet the Labor Party was selling Housing Trust properties in the order of 500 a year; something like $1 billion in 10 years, or something in that order. I have quoted those figures to the parliament before, and I am amazed and shocked—

The Hon. S.G. Wade interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Minister for Health and Wellbeing, you don't need to add anything.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: —that the Labor Party even raises this issue. We do have some sales of properties because some of them become surplus and we are putting in new ones, and so forth. Our program is running at less than half of what Labor's was in those years.

Through our strategy that was released last year—and I think potentially through the budget stimulus as well—we are intending to provide some new public housing. There is also the stock that was transferred to the social housing sector, the community housing providers. They are increasing their stock of new build through that program. We have also had a focus on affordable housing, because when people get into rental stress or have trouble paying their mortgages they may become homeless and then fall into needing assistance from the state government.

As part of the early intervention measures we have been very strong on saying that we need to have a boost for affordable housing, and so that is a large component of what the 10-year strategy is. We think that's actually a neglected part of the market because a lot of people are either working, or there may be a household where some people who are Centrelink recipients are sharing a house with people who are working and so forth but their incomes aren't that high, and they would really like to get into the affordable purchase.

So those are the areas that we are focused on: having a large strategy in which we have managed to get a number of private developers on board in that sense so that we are building the sort of stock that South Australians want.

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