Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Housing. What progress has been made—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Those in the chamber that wish to have a chat can go outside and have the chat.

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What progress has been made in the government’s efforts to repair and build social housing, and what impact has this made on local employment?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Canberra for her question. In fact, just this morning the member for Canberra and I visited the first house to be built under the Nation Building Economic Stimulus Plan’s social housing component in her electorate—the first house in the ACT, in the member’s own electorate. It is a four-bedroom house, a class C adaptable dwelling, a six-star energy rated new home for a family.

I met

Joanna, the lovely woman who is going to move into this new home with her three children, Brandon, Madeline and 15-month-old Ava, as did the member for Canberra. Little Ava is blind and she will need a wheelchair as she grows up, and Joanna and her family have been living in a two-storey terrace style house that will be completely unsuitable for Ava as she grows up. She needs to be carried up and down stairs with the equipment that she is connected to 20 hours out of every 24 hours of the day. She has to be lifted in and out of the bath. That is okay while she is 15 months old, but it will not be okay as she grows up. This house has been purpose built for someone in a wheelchair and will make little Ava’s life, her mother Joanna’s life and the life of their family just so much easier.

I also met the staff of Vogue Constructions, who built this home. This is one of seven homes that they have won through stage 1 of the social housing building program. Stuart Sampson and Nathan Toscan, the directors of Vogue Constructions, told me about the extra people they had put on. Stuart told me that they had employed one extra full-time and one extra part-time employee since they won this work for the seven extra properties, and Nathan estimated that over 60 people had worked on this property over the course of its construction.

I also wanted to tell the House about the repairs and maintenance program, a component of this package that has been so extraordinarily successful. When this program is complete we will have done work on more than 60,000 homes right around Australia, and 30,000 of those homes have already been completed. Another 14,000 homes have benefited by work done in common areas. Perhaps most importantly, over 10,000 properties will have substantial upgrades and major work done on them. These are properties that have been sitting vacant or would have become uninhabitable over the next couple of years if major work had not been done on them. We had a target of returning 2½ thousand properties to active use. In fact, we will exceed that target fourfold. We will return more than 10,000 properties to active use that would have been lost from public housing stock had we not done this work. This means many more homes for disadvantaged Australians, a greater contribution to meeting our homelessness targets and a great deal more work for tradespeople across the country.

Mr Speaker, I will just give you a couple of examples of these homes that I visited. In April I went to see some terrace homes in Gertrude Street in Fitzroy. They are old terrace houses. They had been old-style rooming houses with little individual rooms, very run-down and very unsafe. No-one stayed there for long—in fact, no-one lived there if they could help it—because of the very poor condition of this housing. I went there to see these terrace houses converted to 19 self-contained little units. They are close to jobs, they are close to transport, they are close to a hospital for people who need ongoing medical care and, best of all, they have great security. So people will stay there. They will build up a community. As a direct result of the stimulus program, we will be able to use that housing, which had been closed down. It was so badly run-down it had to be closed. That will be returned to active use. Yarra Community Housing will run it.

Opposition Member:

An opposition member—Boring!

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

‘Boring.’ That is boring, is it? Housing homeless Australians is boring—that tells us everything we needed to know. Housing homeless Australians is ‘boring’. Housing Joanna and her family and providing work for these builders is ‘boring’. That tells you a lot, doesn’t it? I will tell this side of the House, because they are interested in housing homeless Australians, that Yarra Community Housing, which will run these properties in north Fitzroy, thought they would have to sell properties in other parts of Melbourne to upgrade these properties. Instead, with $17½ million of our stimulus money, they will be able to keep all of their properties in Melbourne and they will be able to house more homeless Melburnians.

The member for Wakefield and I visited a 50-year-old home in Elizabeth Grove. That was going to be sold. Instead, it will be upgraded and returned to public housing stock. In Glebe, New South Wales, in April I visited a four-bedroom home sitting there empty, impossible to live in. Now it has a family with four kids living in it. Is that pretty boring, is it—a family with four kids living in a home? I have seen these homes right around Australia—old houses, old blocks of units, run-down, starved of repairs, being prepared for sale because there was no money to fix them, instead getting the major upgrades they need so they can be used for social housing. With the help of the states and territories and the great work of builders and tradies right around Australia, we are returning these homes so they can be used by needy Australians.