MPs grill Housing Trust advocate
UPDATED: The chair of the Housing Trust Tenants’ Association has faced a grilling by MPs over a letter described as “misleading” and possibly unlawful which was sent to tenants during last year’s March election campaign.
Frances Magill told MPs this morning that she and her organisation endorsed the letter sent by Julie Macdonald, who was acting chairperson at the time, which warned tenants that the Liberal Party was planning to remove them from their homes.
Magill said she still had not read the letter, and that she was in hospital when Macdonald sent it. Magill appeared at a committee investigating matters arising from the state election to represent the organisation, after Macdonald failed to appear.
She said that the letter was sent to MPs during the election and posted on social media, but not sent directly by the association to tenants.
“It was public information,” she said.
“If people took that information and distributed it, that’s not the responsibly of me or the association.”
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She said that MacDonald “had that authority in her own right as acting chair to do the letter”, and that she was not aware of any other person having seen it or signed it off before if was sent to MPs and published on social media.
Committee Chair and Family First MLC Rob Brokenshire said he was amazed Magill would endorse the sending of the letter, which he described as “misleading at best and may have been unlawful”.
“It was your scaremongering that scared and stressed your tenants,” said Brokenshire.
He described it as a “very, very, very serious matter” that Macdonald had refused to front the inquiry, saying she was “obstructing” the committee, which would use all of the powers it has to see that she does appear.
Magill admitted the Association had received worried phone calls from residents about the letter, which suggested a Steven Marshall victory could see SA tenants lose their homes and be taxed on having empty bedrooms. At the time, the Liberal Party complained to the Electoral Commission about the letter, with Opposition spokesman Duncan McFetridge calling it “an absolutely disgraceful scare campaign”.
“Steven Marshall and I have both said there will be no bedroom tax, no one will be forced out of their homes,” he told reporters mid-campaign.
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“Obviously the badly behaving tenants will have to be dealt with, but nobody’s going to be forced out of their homes.”
However, Labor MP for Croydon Mick Atkinson told InDaily the Liberals had only ever complained about the fact that Macdonald used her PO Box instead of her address on the letter, not its content.
“The Liberal Party had ample opportunity (to complain about the letter’s content),” he said.
“All the facts (in the letter) were true.
Atkinson, who is also the parliamentary Speaker, said he “absolutely” supported the letter, adding because the Liberal Party had not released a housing policy at the time, it was only reasonable to infer that their 2010 policy still applied.
“All this indignation about unlawfulness and so on is so phoney,” he said.
Magill said the “information was on our Facebook page and we also notified independents and other candidates by fax, I understand, of the content of that letter”.
“I support the letter; I support Julie Macdonald; the association supports her,” she said.
“To my knowledge we do not have a list of places that this letter was sent to.”
Magill would not disclose how many members her association had, and was unable to say how long the term for committee members of the association ran.
“We’re not an open organisation,” she said.
“We never disclose the number of members that we have.”
She said the association did not have funding to distribute election material to tenants and that it only held a list of tenants between 1992 and 1997, when it was receiving state government funding. That list had since been destroyed to protect tenant privacy, she told the committee.
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