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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 66 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 22 February 2022 by Mr T.J. Healy

Parliament: 41 Session: 1

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.