News the ACT government mismanaged a tenant relocation program so badly it will take Housing ACT years longer and cost hundreds of millions of dollars more to meet its latest public housing target comes as no surprise.
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This is, after all, a government with a startling list of bungles to its credit. Cases in point include the management of the Mr Fluffy buyback, the CIT "coaching" contract scandal and the abandoned roll-out of a $78 million human resources program that prompted a belated apology from "Special Minister of State" Chris Steel in February.
This time Housing Minister Yvette Berry is taking the heat. Last August she had to apologise to public housing tenants adversely affected by the implementation of a mandatory relocation program being carried out as part of a plan to create 400 more properties at a cost of $600 million by the end of this year.
"I don't think anybody had intended for this to happen. That was not what we wanted to see come out of this program," she said at the time. "It was never anybody's intention to cause even more distress ... I'm very sorry."
Three long-term housing tenants sued the ACT government over the relocations, alleging their human rights had been breached.
The plan, in true ACT government fashion, involved the now familiar "one step forward, two steps back" minuet favoured by territory public servants and their political masters.
One would have thought only the scriptwriters on Utopia or Yes Minister could come up with a plan to increase public housing stock that involved sending more than 300 tenants letters blithely advising them they were going to be kicked out of their homes and relocated to new domiciles not of their own choosing.
While the ACT government has, over almost two decades, been often laughably inept when it comes to community consultation this must surely take the biscuit. It's no wonder the Auditor-General found Housing ACT had shown little or no regard for the wellbeing of its tenants.
"Housing ACT did not acknowledge and mitigate risks to the program arising from ineffective implementation of required tenant relocation," the Auditor-General found.
"This has impacted on the wellbeing of some public housing tenants, damaged relationships with the non-government community services sector and contributed to delays and increased costs of program delivery."
The relocations were necessary because the ACT government wanted to fund the new properties, at least in part, by selling off 700 existing homes. While it might be cynical to suggest the properties to be sold were probably in more desirable locations and that the new ones would be on the city periphery that is what happened when public housing was sold off as part of stage 1 of the light rail.
While the program has now been increased to 1400 homes - 200 more than planned - it will cost $260 million more and take another three years to complete.
This latest setback is further evidence of the government's neglect of social and affordable housing in the ACT over many years. It is just over a month since The Canberra Times reported there had been a decline in the total amount of public housing stock since 2012 and that the ACT had the longest waiting times in the country.
At a time when housing affordability is the worst it has ever been and there just aren't enough homes for the people who need them this government has made the problem worse, not better.
The new target won't even come close to keeping pace with population growth. Apologies are not enough.
The government needs to do better if it is keep the confidence of voters in an election year.
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