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

It is time to stand up for public housing. Safe and secure housing should be a human right but it is increasingly out of the reach of many people. The Labor government has dropped the ball on housing. In my electorate of Melbourne there are hundreds of people sleeping rough each night, couch surfing or in insecure and crisis housing. Organisations such as Home Ground, with whom I spoke recently, struggle to find safe and affordable accommodation for the people who turn to them for help every day. In a wealthy nation, this is a disgrace.

Public housing is the only housing affordable to many people. Yet tens of thousands of people are on waiting lists and overcrowding is rife. Despite millions of federal dollars going into housing in Australia, there has only been one extra public housing apartment made available in my electorate of Melbourne in the past six years. New social housing has been built, but often at the loss of public housing open space. We have seen public lands sold by state Labor and Liberal Victorian governments, sometimes to create social housing but also to create private and expensive housing.

There are currently more plans afoot for Fitzroy and Richmond. This will result in a loss of green space and it is not clear whether any new public housing will be built on these estates. We do know that in 2009 the federal government gave $175 million to the Victorian government, then Labor and now Liberal, to create new homes in Fitzroy and Richmond. We know that this was intended to introduce a mix of new housing, including affordable private housing. However, apart from selling public land to build private affordable housing, there is no indication that existing public land will be used to support new and improved public housing. The process is causing confusion and concern for tenants. My colleague Greg Barber MLC has said in the Victorian parliament: 'As far as I am aware, no-one has ever asked the tenants what they want.' The Minister for Housing has said in the Victorian parliament:

This master planning process was a stipulation under the funding agreement between the federal government and the Labor government. …the funding agreement also stipulated that … there must be private housing on this estate.

The then state Minister for Housing, Richard Wynne, the member for Richmond, made that funding agreement but is out there now disingenuously saying that he does not agree with it. Tenants are rightly confused and concerned and there is still no new public housing known to be planned for Melbourne. I have met many of the people in Melbourne who are desperately waiting for public housing. One particular man couch-surfs while his pregnant wife and child stay with a generous woman who houses them free of board while the wife helps around the home. This man travels to care for his elderly mother each day. The family has been hoping to be housed in a two- or three-bedroom apartment where they can live and support each other. However, their wait has been long and stressful and as yet unresolved.

My office is currently helping with close to 50 cases of people looking for affordable homes or larger accommodation so that families do not have to squeeze into two-bedroom flats. I have been in regular contact with a family in which six children share three mattresses in a small room. The children have been asked not to come to school when they have displayed signs of scabies. In our wealthy electorate of Melbourne we have a chronic shortage of public housing, and cases of scabies in the housing we do have. Scabies is associated with extreme conditions of poverty and overcrowding. It is disgraceful that members of my electorate sleep rough, suffer from disease and had to wait years—sometimes a decade—for affordable housing.

With the right care, support and resources public housing estates are great communities. With 80 per cent of tenants as recipients of Commonwealth benefits, there is a high need for social support. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mere Paora Epere for becoming Citizen of the Year in the City of Yarra for her work with the tenants of Collingwood Public Housing; a well-deserved tribute. Without safe and secure housing we have poverty. From poverty health costs, welfare expenses and crime are born. Turning public housing land into private housing is a false economy. Safe and secure housing is a human right, and the Labor government should be putting this right above the greed of developers and the price of inner-city land. Over the coming months, I will continue to join with thousands of constituents in Melbourne to save public housing and lobby for federal funds to be devoted to public housing, not the sale of green public land for private housing.