Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently, I had a community forum in the Longman electorate around homelessness and housing affordability, which is as bad as I've ever seen it. Like many communities around the country, there are so many people sleeping in parks, on benches and in tent cities that have sprung up, plus there has been a massive uplift in couch surfing, which is certainly not as visible as the other cohorts I've already mentioned. The forum was attended by concerned community members and organisations that either have empathy for or are physically involved in assisting people who are experiencing difficulty when it comes to housing. The format was a panel that included a local real estate agent, Karen George from Richardson & Wrench; an organisation called Eats 4 the Streets, which provides meals and groceries to the homeless and others doing it tough, represented by founder Michael Cox; and City of Moreton Bay councillor Adam Hain.

Here are some quick statistics on City of Moreton Bay homeless. The number of clients financially assisted with payments for short-term and emergency accommodation grew by almost 280 per cent from 2018 to 2023. There are 2,517 people on the public housing waitlist in just this one local government area in Queensland.

I suspected the 1½ hours allotted for this forum would not be enough, and, unfortunately, I was correct. We had managed only to discuss the issues and barely touched on solutions, which was the main objective, so I will be holding a second event in November that will focus on solutions to the problems that we raised at this first forum.

We heard from Janice, a local 74-year-old who shared her story. For many years, she had been renting a granny flat from a couple at the back of their property. The couple have now sold, and the new owners can't rent it to her. Janice is a single woman on a pension. She doesn't even own a car. She approached the State Housing department and was told, 'Sorry; we have nothing available.' I asked the real estate agent how the private rental market was, and she said they have over 1,000 properties on their rent roll and there are, at the moment, three up for rent. At the inspections for these properties, over 40 families are turning up. Not one of them is under $700 per week rent. Janice said she was now looking for a street corner or a tree to sleep under.

Landlords often bear the brunt of the blame for increasing rents, but they have been forced to raise rents due to the massive increase in the average price of homes. In Caboolture South, the average price has risen from $411,000 in 2019 to $645,000 in 2024. That, along with the 12 interest rate rises that we've had in the last couple of years, has just made the mortgage repayments so high that they are forced to increase their rents.

The only good news that came out of it was that there was someone who was at the forum who was actually able to find Janice a home, so I'm pleased to say that Janice won't be sleeping under a tree. She'll be sleeping in a bed—and rightly so.