By Parker McKenzie
The Draft Social and Affordable Housing Strategy Action Plan elicited a strong response from Knox City Councillors, with some supporting the push for more to be done while others stating they haven’t seen the influence of the previous plans come to fruition.
The motion to adopt the plan was discussed at the Wednesday 26 April Council meeting.
Cr Soronia Grasso, who sits on the Eastern Affordable Housing Alliance for the council, commended the report.
“We start from the basic principle Madam Chair, that housing is a basic human right and that stable housing contributes to stable education, employment opportunities, and health and wellbeing,” she said.
Cr Nicole Seymour also supported adopting the action plan, and said she wanted to “touch base on why council should be in this space.”
“People often say to me, Nicole, this isn’t council’s core business, you shouldn’t be worrying about this,” she said.
“Social housing isn’t just about people about the homeless, it’s not just about people who are welfare dependent, yes we have those in Knox, but we also have a large tranche of the people that we’re talking about are what can be defined as working poor.
“Hard work working, honest residents who through their choice of employment, might be working in care jobs, might be working in retail, they might be working in our factories in Bayswater. The reality is that cost of living and salaries have not kept pace.”
Cr Darren Pearce spoke against the motion and said he has been around long enough to see two previous iterations of the social housing strategy.
“You cannot force developers to contribute to this. It depends on the goodwill and the only way you’re going to get the goodwill is if we are going to allow higher density,” he said.
“If we get involved in these sorts of things we’ve got towards have a strategy that demonstrates how we achieve real results, not just engage in virtue signalling, and I believe this is the problem.”
The motion to adopt the Action Plan was passed by the council.
