Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You would think that, with housing out of control in Melbourne and over 35,000 people stuck on waiting lists for public housing, governments would be building new public housing on the scale that we did in the 1960s; but, instead, the Victorian Labor government wants to sell off public housing land in the inner city to private developers. Developers stand to make big profits but public housing residents stand to lose out. By the time they finish turning the Flemington estate, which is around the corner from me, into a Docklands-style area, there will be 20 new social housing units and 820 new private developments. Residents have been kept in the dark and are facing huge insecurity. The Labor government is even stopping my office from delivering information about the redevelopment to residents. When the government decides what citizens can read about the future of their own homes, we are in scary territory. This plan isn't about increasing public housing stock on the scale we need; it is about money.

Liberal governments have long looked at inner city public housing land and seen dollar signs—we expect that—but Labor should be better. If Labor sells this public land, we will never get it back and Melbourne's public housing and Melbourne's housing crisis will only get worse. But residents are fighting back. Yesterday, the state Greens MP Ellen Sandell and I joined hundreds of residents and supporters in Flemington to say no to the sell-offs. The communities stopped the sell-offs in Richmond and Fitzroy five years ago when the Liberals tried to do it, and we can do it again with this Victorian Labor government.

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