One case the ACT Ombudsman later singled out involved an elderly, physically disabled pensioner who had lived in her Housing ACT property for decades and expected to stay there for the rest of her life. In February 2022 she was one of more than 300 tenants who received letters informing them their homes had been earmarked for sale or demolition under the government's renewal program, and that — for the first time since the scheme began in 2019 — relocation was now mandatory, not optional. Some of the letters, the Ombudsman later found, read more like marketing material than formal legal notices (ACT Ombudsman, How do you tell someone they have to move?, Jul-2023). Many recipients were elderly, disabled or living with mental illness. It took a formal Ombudsman investigation, a ministerial apology and eighteen months of advocacy before the ACT government abandoned mandatory relocation and returned the program to a voluntary basis in late 2023. The pensioner's home was one of roughly a thousand ageing public-housing properties the Barr Labor–Greens government has earmarked for renewal since 2019 — a program that is not, on the evidence, unjustified in its stated aim. The dispute is about how it was run, and what it actually delivered.
What the government did
Housing ACT, the territory's public-housing landlord, has run the Growing and Renewing Public Housing Program since 2019. The logic is straightforward: much of the ACT's public housing stock was built from the 1960s to the 1980s, is poorly insulated, hard to retrofit for wheelchair access, and sits on land in inner Canberra now worth far more than the ageing dwellings on it. The program identifies older properties — disproportionately concentrated in suburbs such as Narrabundah, Ainslie, Downer and parts of Reid and Griffith — for sale or demolition, uses the proceeds plus budget appropriations to build new public housing elsewhere, and relocates the existing tenants, in many cases to newer stock further from the centre of Canberra. New construction has deliberately been spread across many suburbs rather than built as large blocks, continuing the ACT's long-standing "salt-and-pepper" policy of not concentrating public housing in single estates.
The program was launched with a target of about 1,400 new public and community housing dwellings within six years, while renewing roughly 1,000 older properties (ACT Ombudsman, How do you tell someone they have to move?, background, Jul-2023). In the five years to 2023-24, Housing ACT sold 610 properties for gross revenue of $490.4 million (ACT Auditor-General, Report No. 1 of 2025). The capital-works program attached to the scheme is now budgeted at $867 million over eight years (ACT Auditor-General, Report No. 1 of 2025), on top of a further $108 million added in the 2024-25 Budget — taking the Housing ACT Capital Works Program past $530 million over four years — and a $364 million "Public Housing Pipeline" funding 450 new publicly owned homes announced in the 2025-26 Budget (ACT Budget 2024-25 and 2025-26, Housing ACT capital works).
The strongest case
Ageing stock has to be renewed somehow, and dispersal beats concentration
Much of this case is genuinely sound, and largely inherited rather than invented by the Barr government. Housing built fifty or sixty years ago under the old Commonwealth-state housing agreements was never designed for an ageing, more disabled tenant population, and retrofitting some of it costs more than replacing it outright. Selling high-value inner land to cross-subsidise new, better-located and better-built homes is a financing model used by public-housing authorities across Australia, not an ACT invention — the alternative is either a smaller maintenance budget or a larger call on general revenue that no ACT government, of either colour, has been willing to make. The "salt-and-pepper" principle of spreading public housing through many suburbs rather than concentrating it in large estates also has a defensible rationale: concentrated, under-maintained public-housing estates in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane became bywords for entrenched, self-reinforcing disadvantage, and the ACT has largely avoided that specific failure mode. A government renewing an ageing asset base while trying not to recreate stigmatised estates is not, on its face, doing something wrong.
The evidence
The dispute is not over whether renewal was needed. It is over what the numbers show once the program is measured against the population it serves and against the government's own original promise.
Waitlists tell the same story from the demand side. As at 30 September 2025, 3,486 households were approved and waiting for a standard public-housing offer, and a further 1,037 were on the internal transfer list (ACT Government, Waiting lists for public housing, Sep-2025). Data to mid-2025 put the average wait for a "high needs" household at roughly 1,069 days — just under three years — and for a "standard needs" household at roughly 1,785 days, or close to five years; only applicants on the priority list, reserved for people facing homelessness or acute risk, waited a comparatively short 148 days on average (ACT Government, Waiting lists for public housing, Jun-2025, approx.).
Even the count of existing stock is contested. Housing ACT's own published snapshots show growth from 11,633 dwellings in January 2024 to 11,873 in June 2025 — a net increase of roughly 240 dwellings over eighteen months (ACT Government housing snapshots, approx.). The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's independent count for a similar period is lower, at 10,952 public housing dwellings as at June 2024, and ACT Shelter's chief executive has publicly disputed the government's figures as inflated by counting head-leased dwellings managed by community housing providers as public housing stock (AIHW, Housing assistance in Australia, Jun-2024; Canberra Times reporting citing ACT Shelter, 2025). The ACT Council of Social Service and ACT Shelter argue social housing needs to reach at least 10 per cent of the territory's total housing stock by 2036 to meet projected need — a target current growth rates do not put the ACT on track to hit.
The relocation record — forced moves and the Ombudsman
The clearest evidence of how the program was executed, rather than what it aimed to do, sits in the ACT Ombudsman's investigation. In February 2022, Housing ACT shifted from voluntary to mandatory relocation, issuing notices to more than 300 tenants whose properties had been earmarked for sale or redevelopment. The Ombudsman opened an own-motion investigation in December 2022 after complaints from tenants and advocates, including the ACT Council of Social Service and former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, who had publicly called on the government to abandon forced moves altogether.
The Ombudsman's report, released in July 2023 under the title How do you tell someone they have to move?, found that Housing ACT had not kept engagement and support for vulnerable tenants front of mind as it implemented mandatory relocation, that its communication with tenants was impersonal and caused significant distress, and that the agency lacked a clear, accessible exemptions policy for tenants with strong medical, disability or family reasons to stay put (ACT Ombudsman, Jul-2023). The report made nine recommendations; Housing ACT and its parent directorate accepted all of them. Four days after the report's release the government paused mandatory relocations, and by November 2023 it had converted the entire program back to a voluntary basis. Housing Minister Yvette Berry apologised publicly in August 2023, describing the decision-making process as flawed (Canberra Times, Aug-2023). A group of affected tenants has since pursued a class action against the ACT government alleging the relocation process was unconscionable, which had cleared a preliminary legal hurdle as reported in 2024 (approx.) (Canberra Times reporting, 2024).
The critique
Put the numbers from the evidence section together and a program that reads as reasonable in principle looks considerably less reassuring in practice.
First, on the government's own auditor's assessment, growth is largely an illusion once population is accounted for. The ACT Auditor-General's Report No. 1 of 2025 found that while the program will produce a net increase of 400 public homes by 2027 compared with 2019, in real terms available housing stock will not grow — because the ratio of public housing to population falls from roughly 26 to roughly 24 homes per 1,000 residents over the same period. A program marketed as "growing and renewing" public housing is, on the audit office's own numbers, a program that renews housing while allowing the safety net to shrink relative to the city it serves. That matters because the original 2019 promise was for around 1,400 new public and community dwellings within six years — a considerably larger commitment than the net 400 the Auditor-General now credits the scheme with delivering by 2027, before even adjusting for population growth.
Second, the process used to sell and buy well over a billion dollars of property was run without basic safeguards. The Auditor-General found Housing ACT did not conduct a probity risk assessment, did not develop a probity plan, and did not engage an independent probity adviser for a program involving more than $600 million in asset sales and more than $600 million in purchases. Guidance on how many valuations were required before setting a sale or purchase price was inconsistent and poorly communicated, allowing officers latitude of up to 15 per cent variation between two valuations before a third was required (ACT Auditor-General, Report No. 1 of 2025). None of this proves any individual transaction was corrupt — the audit made no such finding — but it means the government cannot demonstrate, with the paperwork it kept, that Canberra's tenants and taxpayers reliably got fair value on either side of well over a billion dollars in transactions.
Third, the human cost of speed fell overwhelmingly on the tenants with the least capacity to absorb it. The Ombudsman's investigation was not triggered by a handful of edge cases; it found systemic failures in how Housing ACT identified, communicated with and supported a caseload skewed toward elderly, disabled and mentally ill tenants during the mandatory-relocation phase. The government's return to voluntary relocation is the right call — but it took an Ombudsman inquiry, nine formal recommendations, a ministerial apology and a still-unresolved class action to get there, on a program the government had already been running for three years.
Fourth, the "salt-and-pepper" dispersal principle — the part of the strategy with the strongest de-concentration rationale — has not obviously been applied evenly. A 2019 analysis found the policy obscures rather than addresses the disadvantage experienced by an estimated 37,000 low-income Canberrans on a low equivalised income (approx., 2019). Critics have also pointed out that some replacement homes have been built on $1.5–2 million inner-city blocks in streets that already carry a high concentration of public and community housing — the opposite of dispersal, and an expensive way to generate the small number of additional dwellings the program nets out to.
The government sold homes, relocated tenants and rebuilt — and on its own auditor's numbers, ends the program with fewer public homes for every resident than it had when it began.
Finally, the government's own count of what it has built is contested. Even setting aside the AIHW's lower independent figure, growth in Housing ACT's published dwelling count — roughly 240 net additional dwellings in the eighteen months to June 2025 — has run well behind both the growth in the approved waiting list and the scale of the 13,200-dwelling target Labor took to the 2024 election. None of this means renewal was the wrong idea. It means the execution — the pace, the paperwork and the arithmetic — has not matched the rhetoric.
The risk to the future
A safety net that renews itself thinner every cycle
Canberra's population is forecast to keep growing, and the ACT's public-housing waitlist — already running to multi-year waits for anyone outside the priority category — will grow with it. If a program billed as "growing and renewing" public housing instead delivers, on the government's own auditor's numbers, a falling ratio of homes to residents, then each future renewal cycle starts from a weaker base than the last: older stock sold at the top of an expensive property market, replaced more slowly than the population grows, with a widening gap for the community-housing sector and Commonwealth funding the ACT does not control to fill. The 2025-26 Budget's $364 million Public Housing Pipeline and Labor's 1,000-dwelling, 13,200-home-by-2030 election commitment suggest the government itself now recognises the original program was not enough on its own. The deeper risk is one of trust: a system that relies on tenant cooperation and public confidence to keep renewing itself has spent the past three years generating an Ombudsman investigation, an Auditor-General finding of probity gaps, and a class action. If the next renewal phase runs on the same footing, both the willingness of vulnerable tenants to cooperate and the political room to keep selling public land to fund it will be harder to find.