Greens MLA Deb Foskey made some very sound points on public housing this week.
But she was hardly in a position to take the high moral ground.
She was condemning the Government over Burnie Court at Lyons which used to house 245 families or singles in public housing until they were told four years ago that their building was to be demolished.
In the first stage of redevelopment only 6 per cent of the 130 new units are to be for public tenants.
“We need to ensure that public housing is not progressively moved to the outer edges of Canberra away from community services,” Foskey said.
Government tenants were the very people most likely to need these services she argued.
This is all very well, but the key way for the Government to continue to supply government housing to the needy in inner areas is for existing tenants to occasionally move out – in particular, tenants who no longer have the need for government help.
Given this, you would think that Foskey would keep her head down on the subject of public housing after it was revealed earlier this year that she was living in a government house while on an MLA’s salary of more than $100,000 after allowances.
The argument on public housing has been going on all year and stems from the peculiar history of public housing in Canberra
In the early 1950s Prime Minister Robert Menzies cranked up plans to make a national capital out of the country town that was Canberra. Public servants were transferred en masse from Melbourne where the Federal Parliament had sat from federation until it came to Canberra in 1927 (without much of the bureaucracy).
By 1958 when he set up the National Capital Development Commission, the waiting list for government housing was about 3000. Many families lived in demountables and other temporary arrangements, even tents.
In those days it required a huge government effort to house the moving public servants and their families. Getting a government house became a right, irrespective of means, simply because the public servants would not move otherwise, and in any event, private housing was so scarce as not to be an option for so many arrivals.
The legacy has been the highest proportion of government housing of any jurisdiction other than the Northern Territory which as a Commonwealth territory was in a similar boat as the ACT. (There is also another legacy I’ll mention later.)
The ACT has about 12,000 government dwellings, about 10 per cent of total dwellings. It should mean, but does not, that the ACT is in the best position to house the needy.
These days admission to the waiting list is means-tested, on a reasonably generous basis, but not on a continuing basis. If you get into a government house, you cannot be removed from it however high your income or assets grow. You could even be earning as much as a Member of the Legislative Assembly and not be required to move out to make way for a needy family – the sort of family whose cause the Greens are usually championing. Some estimates suggest that about 15 per cent of government houses are now occupied by people who would not qualify if they applied on their present assets and income. It may be much higher.
We now no longer have to supply government housing to entice people to come to Canberra.
What is more important here: giving tenancy for life to people who are no longer needy or to have some housing available to the needy? What is the Government’s role?
So while probably 2000 reasonably well-off people are living in government housing nearly 6000 singles and people in low-income families are moving from pillar to post. You would think the Government’s role would be to support the needy. Wrong. The Government’s role is not to alienate potential voters. The right to stay in a Government house with quite low rent is probably a vote-changing policy. No government tenant on a high income will vote for a party that wants them to move out to make way for a more needy family.
The Government argues that once a family hits a certain income it pays market rent, so there is no subsidy. Wrong. The “market rents” charged by government are well below real market. In any event, this is no justification. What is government doing in the real-estate business?
More broadly, the Government owns and manages about $2.5 billion worth of housing stock. It is far too much to do the job of housing those who cannot house themselves. Government has other more pressing work than housing those on reasonable incomes. It could sell those houses (many to existing tenants) and use the money on hospitals and schools.
The policy of giving tenancy for life assumes a permanent, static underclass of poverty-stricken people. Poverty is not like that. For most, it is a temporary state – being student, being unemployed for a while, falling ill, becoming drug addicted. But it is not a lifetime affliction and therefore should not warrant a life tenancy of a government house.
And you are not doing the tenants any good. Home ownership is a key indicator for better long-term wealth and health.
I must declare some interests here: I have been a government tenant, a private tenant, a private owner and an investment property owner in Canberra.
The other legacy of the growth of Canberra in the 1950s is that the two central areas were never given pleasant geographic names like Belconnen, Tuggeranong, Weston Creek, Woden and Gungahlin. And they are pleasant names, irrespective of the quality of some of the development there.
The inner areas are more prosaically named Inner North and Inner South.
I propose that the Inner North be renamed Menzies. Menzies’ legacy to Canberra deserves more than a single suburb being named after him. And the Inner South should be renamed Griffin because the street lay-out and the large blocks mirror his original plans more closely than anywhere else in Canberra.