Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Two speeches ago the member for Petrie mentioned that no-one from the coalition was talking on homelessness. Well, I am here to talk on it. I have raced up just to talk about homelessness in my electorate of Swan.

Last Tuesday, a distressed lady called Linda came to my office seeking assistance. Linda had recently been made homeless after being forced to leave her rental property. She also has cancer. With no affordable rental accommodation in the area, Linda approached Homes West for help. With the chronic shortage in public housing, Linda was told that she would have to wait indefinitely for somewhere to live. Sadly, she is now one of the 17,000 Western Australians on a waiting list for Homes West accommodation and has to sleep in her car at night. Unfortunately Linda is just one of the many locals who have approached me recently for help. There are members of my local community that are being pushed to breaking point.

There are two aspects of this problem. First, there is a chronic shortage of affordable private rental accommodation in Perth. This has led to a median rent for houses and units in Perth going up by between 17 and 25 per cent respectively in the 12 months to June. Often, as in Linda’s case, rental properties are sold by owners, leaving the occupants nowhere to live. Second, the Carpenter government’s neglect has allowed Homes West’s waiting list to get out of control, leaving those who really need it no chance of obtaining accommodation. What do we define as ‘out of control’? Does the emergency housing waiting period of 18 months sound satisfactory? The normal waiting list is five years. What a sad indictment of the performance of the Gallop and then Carpenter governments, who have idly sat by and watched. The Carpenter government is giving us plenty of spin with no action or substance to their spin to solve these problems. Where have we heard this before? Labor, as they did under Brian Burke, are catering to the top end of the town and ignoring their traditional supporters, with poor or no solutions to grave problems within the community.

I recently had the pleasure of welcoming the member for Farrer, the shadow minister for housing, to my electorate. She witnessed the WA government’s attempted response to the housing crisis. The shadow minister, the local South Perth MLA, John McGrath, and I met with a very angry and frustrated local Rivervale action group to discuss uneven public housing development in Perth. Instead of a pragmatic long-term plan for housing shortages, the response of Eric Ripper, the WA Treasurer, to the crisis has been to concentrate the few new public houses being built in WA in his own state electorate—homes where stock levels in 1999-2000 were roughly 35,000 and today that remains the same. That tells me that the Carpenter government has not addressed the issue. Some of these houses have taken three years to build, and the people of Swan and WA deserve better. There are plenty of empty state-owned blocks sitting vacant in other electorates, with no attempt by this uncaring state government to provide any sort of housing relief. The Homes West people do their best with limited resources and should be congratulated for the efforts they make.

This state inactivity has sparked great anticipation as to a federal response. This is why I am receiving numerous inquiries through my office, as the hopes for some of these people are now focusing on a federal solution. Unfortunately the Rudd government’s response gives them little hope at present. The Rudd government’s Housing Affordability Fund does little more than reward current state inefficiency by paying state and local government for what they should already be doing. The most innovative part of the fund is the $30 million for electronic development assessments, which—can you believe it, Madam Deputy Speaker?—will not speed up the process but only allow people to monitor the progress. It is a true ‘grocery watch’ style white elephant.

The National Rental Affordability Scheme is designed to deliver 50,000 new affordable rental properties over the next four years on a national basis. We have all received the glossy brochures telling us about this great scheme, but where is the legislation? If the government thinks that 50,000 new homes over four years will solve the total problem, they are dreaming. If they think they can build 50,000 houses in that time, they are dreaming. On a current timeline, that is 240 houses per week built and completed over four years.

How do any of these policies help people like Linda? Another problem is reduced land supply induced by restrictive land policy releases of the state government. It is often called land banking, and the developer mates of the Carpenter government sit on the land until its best financial option is to release it and make a profit. With no help from the government, the onus wrongly falls on local charitable organisations. These, as you can imagine, have been pushed to breaking point.

Recently I heard from a pastor of another large community centre who has many people living in cars and sleeping in parks near his centre. Previously, he could always find them accommodation. He advises them to use all their money for rent and provides them with food. Often when people are living in their cars—and there are many—he sends them up to Kings Park, on the west side, near the Vietnam Vets’ area to cook on the barbeques at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. He gives them food and blankets to survive. This is not Iraq; this is happening in Australia. These invaluable organisations cannot keep covering up for the Rudd government’s shortfalls. I implore the Rudd government to abandon spin, embrace substance and avert looming disaster in Swan, Western Australia, by presenting a real and achievable housing action plan by the much-vaunted COAG. (Time expired)