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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-10-15 Daily Xml
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Disability Housing

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:03): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding disability and housing.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.E. HANSON: In this place yesterday, the minister said:

…the South Australian Housing Authority, they seek to have a minimum standard of, off the top of my head, 90 per cent of new builds to be built to a silver standard for disability access…

The minister's own 10-year housing strategy, the list action number of 1.5, states:

Mandate sustainable housing design and environmental standards for a minimum of 75% of new public housing.

Chapter 2.3 of the SA Housing Authority's design guidelines has stated for more than a decade the following:

The SAHT building program is committed to providing a minimum of 75 per cent of all new houses to meet or exceed the criteria in this guideline.

For the minister's benefit, neither her own new strategy nor the authority's technical guidelines refer to 90 per cent of homes being at the silver level of Liveable Housing Australia design guidelines. The Liveable Housing Australia silver level requires eight elements of compliance, but the Housing Authority document which she has produced links only two of those out of the eight—that's a quarter of the elements.

Finally, the silver level of design guidelines is the lowest of any of the accessibility standards, there being a gold and platinum standard also. My questions to the minister are: why can't your new agency, which has new additional executives and, as we know, a chairman who is paid twice as much, achieve more than one-quarter of the compliance to the lowest accessibility standard? Secondly, is the target 75 per cent or 90 per cent, and is the standard of the Liveable Housing Australia's silver level or indeed her agency's own internal standard?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:05): I have to hand it to the honourable member: he's got me. It is 75 per cent, not 90 per cent. But as I said in my response yesterday, I was working from my memory, not from notes, but I knew that it was a reasonably high level. Can I also say that the South Australian Housing Authority is also a lead in terms of the universal design across South Australia for adopting Liveable Housing Australia design guidelines for new social housing stock and is part of how to incorporate universal design principles in residential construction and maintenance specifications, and has other lead actions in terms of the Liveable Housing standards.

I think it is also important to note that there are other categories of housing standards for people with disabilities, particularly through the SDA payments. There are a number of organisations that are seeing some market development in South Australia for SDA. I think it is estimated that 6 per cent of people with disability who are on the NDIS are likely to be eligible for SDA. What the SDA payments do is provide those organisations with an ongoing payment, so it makes it much more attractive for organisations to fund those going forward, and those particular builds are at a much higher level and obviously part of the NDIA system. There is a range of non-government organisations that operate in this space, particularly Uniting Communities, which has the site that is the old Maughan Church, which is called—

The Hon. S.G. Wade: U City.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: U City, thank you very much. They operate the U City. I am aware that the Summer Foundation is also engaged in a range of construction in South Australia. One of their new plans that they are working towards is Norwood Green. They are building a number of sites there, and there are also some other community housing providers that operate community housing for people with disabilities, including Unity Housing and Access 2 Place. They are just some of the organisations that also operate in this space to provide a range of options for people with disabilities through the various spectrums of their needs.

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