Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In Cockburn in my electorate only a few weeks ago, a ranger asked a homeless man to move on from the place on the beach where he had been sleeping. I am very sorry to say that early the next morning the man was found hanging from a tree. Earlier this year a young single mother with three children came to my office. Her lease had ended and she could not find another private rental. There is a two-year waiting list for public housing, so she was sleeping with her children in their car.

During the past year, I have been a frequent visitor to Saint Patrick’s Community Support Centre in Fremantle, which does incredible work for homeless and disadvantaged people in the wider Fremantle community. After the success of the Choir of Hard Knocks, Saint Pat’s started their own singing group, called the Starlight Hotel Choir, so named because of the circumstances in which too many people find themselves at night, with the stars as their only roof. I enjoy singing with this group when I am in the electorate. In February this year, the Fremantle community banded together to hold a benefit concert called Gimme Shelter at the Fremantle Arts Centre, which raised $20,000 for Saint Pat’s. I commend the organisers, Dave Johnson and Phoebe Clark; the sponsors; and the bands who donated their performances. The Gimme Shelter concert will now be an annual event and other members might like to consider promoting this idea in their electorates.

What has struck me in my talks with homeless people is how many of them were previously leading what could be described as relatively normal lives before something happened to change their circumstances—for example, a retrenchment or a sudden illness, domestic violence at home, family breakdown, substance abuse or an inability to cope with the spiralling costs of living. Of course, the issues of homelessness and mental illness are often interrelated; it seems that homelessness is both a cause and a consequence of poor mental health. The other thing that struck me was that, far from choosing a life of perpetual dislocation, the homeless people I listened to all wanted a place of their own, but there was nowhere for them to go.

The chronic lack of public housing has been exacerbated by a booming economy in WA that has seen private rentals soar beyond the reach of the unemployed and low-income earners. Rents in Fremantle have risen by 43 per cent over the last three years; the vacancy rate is around one per cent. In the year 2005-06, there were 637 people in the Fremantle electorate who required supported accommodation assistance. Seventy-two per cent of the adults who required this assistance were women. In that context I would like to mention the Sisters Place in Beaconsfield, which gives women on the streets a safe place to sleep. Many of us are fortunate enough to take a safe bed each night for granted.

Housing is a fundamental human right, as contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary in December this year. The Rudd Labor government is serious about the problem of homelessness and about the underlying conditions that give rise to it. I welcome the release of the homelessness green paper and the hard work that the Minister for Housing is doing to address this serious and complex problem as a matter of national concern. (Time expired)