Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He said:

Whilst we provide housing for most government agencies, WA Country Health we do not. And at the time there were some negotiations with WA Country Health as to whether they were interested in some of the apartments. There are probably 300—

Remember this figure—

GROH dwellings in Karratha; it is not insignificant. One of the options that was debated at the time was whether we could—

'We' is the department—

encourage people to move into these apartments and thereby free up houses in the town. Again there has been some reluctance for that to happen, which we did not anticipate given the quality and finish of the apartments and the facilities that are available. But people make choices for all sorts of reasons.

So what we have is the government made a down payment to a trust— not a deposit—for apartments in Pelago East. Unprecedented!

Estimates show that for Pelago East stage 2 in Karratha 23,741,000 taxpayer dollars was paid in 2012 2013 and 5,931,000 taxpayer dollars were paid in 2000 1314. On 17 February the WA government, the Liberal-National Barnett government, announced shared home-ownership schemes for 26 Pelago East apartments. Let's just get the picture. The government bought these units, with taxpayer dollars, at the height of the boom, when it was really booming in Karratha, when you could not get housing for government workers. The market has collapsed.

On 17 February this year, in all their wisdom, the WA government announced this shared ownership scheme for these apartments, offering a 60-40 split: 60 per cent home owner to pay; 40 per cent Department of Housing. What a wonderful investment of taxpayers' dollars! Buy at the top of the market, let the market collapse, help out your mates and proper property developers and possibly help out somebody else in building construction and then you cannot put government workers in them. Then you have massive overflow of housing in Karratha. So what to do? 'Let's go and lose some more taxpayers' dollars. Let's offer a 40 per cent tax rebate.'