The well-worn adage that if you fail to plan you are planning to fail appears to be the perfect descriptor for what passes for public housing policy in the ACT.
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While there has never been a golden age when government-managed housing was available to everybody who needed it, the shortage has never been this acute.
As of January 1 the waiting time for priority housing was 256 days. Eligibility criteria includes being homeless, having serious health issues, being disabled or elderly, being an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, experiencing domestic violence or be caring for children at risk of abuse or neglect.
How can it be that people whose lives are in upheaval due to one or more of those factors must wait almost nine months to get a secure roof over their heads?
But it gets worse. The waiting time for people with "one or more health or wellbeing needs" on the high-needs waitlist was 1207 days (about three years and four months).
That's almost double the national average waiting time for public housing of 637 days.
The position of those who only meet the "basic eligibility criteria for social housing" beggars belief. At 1946 days it is more than three times the national average.
As things stand a person who applies for public housing in the ACT on socioeconomic grounds today faces a wait of almost five-and-a-half years.
It is highly likely that their personal circumstances will have changed significantly in that time; and not necessarily for the better.
The reason for these shamefully long waiting times is obvious. The ACT government has not made social and affordable housing enough of a priority, choosing instead to focus on costly projects such as the light rail.
While there are well-documented problems in the ACT's health, education, criminal justice and planning sectors over the past decade nothing has suffered from as much apparent indifference and neglect as social and affordable housing.
How can any government justify presiding over a real decline in public housing stock over more than a decade? In 2012, when the ACT's population was 411,000, there were 11,846 properties on the books compared to 11,612 today.
The population has grown to 478,000 in that time.
To even be treading water the Barr government should have grown its public housing by at least 16 per cent - or about 1900 homes.
While some rejuvenation of existing housing stock has taken place and new homes are being built, the government has failed to reinvest the $1.1 billion it has made from the sale of public housing - much of it as part of the light rail development - over the past 12 years.
Only $990 million has gone into developing new homes; a shortfall of $110 million dollars. That would have built a lot of houses, townhouses and units.
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To be fair the ACT is not the only jurisdiction that has failed in this area.
Writing in December 2022 the Australia Institute's chief economist Greg Jericho noted that public sector housing approvals were at two-year lows and that just 210 public sector houses and apartments had been approved in the previous month.
During the 1970s and 1980s Australia was building more than 1000 units of public housing a month.
Dr Jericho highlights the emphasis on private sector housing development over the past decade as a major issue.
"We should be seeking to return to the place we were before the neo-liberal belief that the private sector is best suited to cure all social-economic problems," he said.
Given what has happened in the ACT it is hard to argue with that.
