ACT Govt gets 60 days to reveal housing records as 588 homes vacant

Canberra’s public housing system will be forced open to scrutiny after the Legislative Assembly voted on 28 October to make the ACT Government disclose vacancy, maintenance and spending records within 60 days, Region Canberra reported. The Crossbench motion behind the order landed against a backdrop of 588 vacant public homes and 3,652 people already approved and still waiting for one. Greens MLA Rebecca Vassarotti and independent MLA Thomas Emerson co-sponsored the motion, which compels Housing ACT to table briefings, maintenance reports, vacancy counts and spending figures before the Assembly.

Why it matters

Negotiators doubled the original timeline: the motion first sought disclosure inside 30 days, but Housing Minister Suzanne Orr secured an extra month by arguing the government would have to assemble new reporting rather than hand over material it already tracks in that form.

Emerson used the debate to point to a system under strain, telling MLAs the waiting list had swelled by more than 600 households since 2024 while the share of properties meeting an acceptable standard had slipped from 81 per cent in 2016 to just 71 per cent now. “Something is fundamentally broken here,” he said.

Opposition support came from the Canberra Liberals, whose spokesperson on social housing, Chiaka Barry, argued the government was letting properties fall below liveable condition. She raised the case of one constituent stuck for three months waiting on a collapsed roof to be fixed.

The final motion carves out an exemption for anything that would identify individual tenants or expose the location of sensitive properties. Once the first disclosure lands, the reporting duty does not end there, which means the response-time and spending data Housing ACT has kept internal becomes a recurring public yardstick for every contractor and provider working its maintenance contracts.

The numbers

The headline figures from the debate: 588 public homes sitting empty while 3,652 people who have already cleared the approval process wait for one, with a typical wait now running past five years. Barry put finer numbers on that wait, telling the Assembly a standard applicant waits 1,875 days on average and a standard transfer request takes 1,586 days.

What’s next

Housing ACT now has until the 60-day mark to hand over the records, and the motion as amended keeps it reporting on how the system is performing after that, not just once. Expect vacancy and maintenance numbers to keep coming back at future sittings rather than landing in a single batch and disappearing.

The order follows the Assembly’s missing middle housing bill, which cut assessment timeframes for subdivisions and granny flats, a sign housing transparency and housing supply are both active fronts in the current Assembly term. Whether the 60-day disclosure produces the granular, repeatable reporting the motion asks for, or a partial release that reopens the argument, will be clear once the records are tabled.