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<h1>The Travels of the <br> Techno-Freedom-Fighter</h1>

The Travels of the
Techno-Freedom-Fighter

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Expanding public and community housing
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The Federal Government committed a serious amount of funding towards the development of public housing at yesterday's Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting. It shines a light on expanding public and community housing in the ACT.

The number of publicly owned dwellings as a proportion of all housing stock has fallen from 11% to 9%, and is still falling. This decline must be reversed, so public and community housing levels stabilise at 10% or higher. The ACT has the highest proportion of tenants in public housing who are not receiving a rent rebate. This is because the ACT Government has no strategy to assist public tenants who have long-term stable employment to enter the private housing market, including through purchase of their ACT Housing dwelling. It is pretty clear that more public housing is needed to replace stock sold off in the last ten years or so. It makes sense that the number of public and community managed dwellings should keep pace with population growth, because the number of homeless is still rising. As the needs of the community change, public and community housing should be adaptable so it can accommodate older people and those with disabilities.

All newly purchased housing should be located close to shops, schools, and public transport routes. It would be beneficial if the ACT Government would build most of the housing acquired by ACT Housing so they are not competing with first home buyers for the cheaper properties, and at least half of the dwellings they acquire having accessible design. This would also go some way in helping the house construction market slowdown. We should promote schemes to assist long term tenants with adequate incomes to move out of public housing, to make room for those on the public housing waiting list who are suffering housing-related poverty. The simple equation is that there needs to be ore public housing and better management of public stock and tenancies.



March 29, 2008 | 9:16 PM Comments  0 comments

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Transport for the citystate
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

It were surprises me that most of the transport advocates that I meet in Canberra tend to believe that the only way that we can make public transport sustainable is if we concentrate our centres of population so that there is a more frequency of people using public transport.

I think that these people get these ideas from the European model of public transport which seems to work so well. I think that the major flaw to most of this thinking is the fact that European cities have always been densely populated (at least for the past few hundred years) so all of the agriculture, housing, general lifestyles of the people who live around the city have been concentrated on that particular city as its centre. Is not a difficult intellectual problem to put a bus service or a train service in to meet up with these traditional routes.

However here in Australia our population spread out along the transport corridors as they were formed, Sydney is a great example. As railways where built the suburbs sprang up around them Here in Canberra we have a ideal transport corridor and that is the railway/highway route to Sydney where there seems to be a lot of people living these days and into the future more and more people come to live in the small towns in the Southern Highlands and Southern tablelands.

I actually think the opposite before going to make Canberra in the capital region work as a metropolitan centre the population needs to stay a spread out as possible. The simple reason for this, is the problem with water that we have here in the southern tablelands. I mean we can go on building dam after them but if the catchment that we are trying to get the water from has a static or diminishing rainfall them all of our efforts will be in vain. It seems to me that the best way forward for a sustainable population is to increase the water catchment area for the population size.

Therefore a fast rail system between be small towns and cities of the Southern tablelands and capital region would be an ideal situation to progress this. Especially with the new diesel electrics that are coming out Rail is the most environmentally sustainable way the transport large amounts of people over 100km. We could utilise the used and disused rail infrastructure, such as the railway line out to Captains Flat the railway line out a Goulburn and the railway line south to Cooma. We could actually get a rail service that would allow people to commute from places like Goulburn and Cooma in less than half an hour. Even if the commute was up to an hour this would not be all that ridiculous to many people. This would also be able to solve a lot of the housing problems that we have here in the ACT because houses in these smaller towns and cities are significantly cheaper than that of the ones that are closer to the city centre of Canberra. Moreover I think that we should build two new railway lines to fully utilise the local capital region population base. One line would go from Civic through Gungahlin Gundaroo and Gunning. The other would go from the city centre through Belconnen and Murranbateman to Yass. We would then be able to linkage of these main carrier lines with light rail through to the other centres in Canberra such as Tuggeranong Woden Manuka Dickson.



March 22, 2008 | 7:14 PM Comments  0 comments

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Housing and shelter
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It is quite frustrating that the majority of my friends find it so hard to be able to afford a house unless they want to go into the next fifty years of debt. With the average house in the ACT becoming close to four hundred thousand dollars it is very unlikely unless you have a double income household with substantial incomes a limited amount of children than you would be able to actually own your own house before you retire. Affordable housing is a real issue, its not just to do with the Australian Dream but also the quality of life, standard of living all the way trough to attracting people to work in the ACT.

What can any government do to help out the situation? Stuffing around with people's house prices is not really that good things the government to do. Its frustrating that many people believe that price of housing is the only way to affect things such as standard of living, quality of life and attracting people to the ACT to work. Because the ACT government actually owns all the land in the ACT there is a lot of pressure from many groups for the ACT government to play a larger role in fixing people's housing prices, or not fixing people's housing prices depending on which side the argument you standing on. I really do believe that the way to attack housing affordability, quality of life and lowering the barriers to participation to the workforce in the ACT is to actually attack the housing market from the rental side of things.

I won't go into the public housing versus social housing argument because I feel strongly about as well. But I really do believe that the way to solve the rental market in the ACT in the sort term, without affecting people's house prices too much, is to actually build a significant amount of full-time students housing, close to the Universities and strictly controlled for only full-time students only. We have a large amount of students here in the ACT, because of the six large tertiary institutions. If we were able to provide a significant amount of housing at a very low cost (I'm talking around $50 - $75 a week) student accommodation that was very basic, I think that there would be a large number of students that would move out of the group houses in the inner suburbs to move closer to university(into this Student accommodation) primarily because it would be cheaper. This would free up a lot housing in the inner suburbs and hopefully bring down rental prices slightly which would allow young families to actually rent houses in the inner suburbs (going some way to addressing the 'greying' of the suburbs phenomenon that is responsible for things such as closing schools and declining services). In saying this we would need to have an investigation and also look at some economic modelling so that we wouldn't do a great deal of harm. But we need to encourage more people to study the ACT through cheaper accommodation, for younger families to move into the inner suburbs and for the entry-level of the workforce 23yo - 30yo to be able to afford housing so that they can work in Canberra.