HOUSING
DIVERSITY PIPELINE
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member
for Southern River, I see you are seeking the call.
66. Mr T.J. HEALY to the Minister for Housing:
I refer to the McGowan Labor
government's efforts to unlock more land across the state in order to
boost the supply of houses, in particular social and affordable housing.
(1) Can the
minister outline to the house how the housing diversity pipeline announced last
week will help increase both housing supply and diversity?
(2) Can the
minister advise the house how this program will support local jobs in the
housing construction industry?
Mr J.N.
CAREY replied:
I want to thank the member for his
question. I say to the member: you need some more lighting there. A selfie
light might assist you—one of those halo lights!
(1)–(2) I
am deeply proud to have worked over the last year with the Minister for
Planning to create the housing diversity pipeline. This work builds on major
investment in our housing and land sectors. We announced a record injection of
$875 million into social housing and $2.1 billion in the next four years to
deliver 3 300 new homes. We also announced the $116 million Regional Land
Booster program, which to date has released 400 residential and industrial lots
in the regions. Now, as a part of our reform agenda and as part of our work on
trying to accelerate the delivery of social and affordable housing, but also
looking to the future, we have created the housing diversity pipeline.
At the heart of this is a very simple
proposition; that is, that government in all times will have land that is lazy
or surplus to government needs. There is a real opportunity for us to leverage
from that land to create affordable and social housing supply into the future.
What we have done over the past year is get into the nitty-gritty and identify
12 key sites—10 in the metro area and two in the regions. These are
sites that are well accessible, close to public transport and in activity
corridors. We are going out to the market and saying to developers, community
housing providers and super funds, ''What can you do with this land in a
flexible arrangement? What social and affordable housing return can you
deliver?'' It could be ground leases. It could be a joint development.
It could be that the state does make a contribution from our social housing
fund. What we are trying to do is look beyond this boom. We have 27 000 housing
approvals—4 000 in the regions. We are in extraordinary times. We do
have a heated construction sector. But what we
know is that we have to look beyond the boom and create a pipeline of work into
future years, and this will do it. It will take probably two years to go
through the processes to get this land released, but in that time we are
looking for interesting propositions that will create not only meaningful jobs,
but also new social and affordable housing across metro and regional Western Australia.