Tuesday, 30 May 2023

Adjournment

Public housing

Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:00): (201) My adjournment debate this evening is for the Minister for Housing, and the action I seek from the minister is to fully fund public housing services in not only the Polwarth electorate but right across the state of Victoria. As shadow minister, it is heartbreaking to continually have to field phone calls, emails, personal meetings and others with absolutely desperate Victorians who just want some assistance – they want advice.

Currently, Minister, the system requires people to go online to book a meeting. They often have to wait 2 and 3 hours on hold in order to make appointments. For those people in public housing in my own electorate of Polwarth, the office is staffed for one day a week, and it can take up to six or seven weeks to actually get an appointment if you have been lucky enough to wait the 2 or 3 hours required to make the booking.

Some choose to go online, but of course many people who are homeless, seeking refuge, living in their car, sleeping in a tent, couch surfing – or whatever predicament they find themselves in – do not necessarily have access to the internet and computers and other things to do online booking. So they find themselves having to go to the public library – if there is one in a country town. They may have to go to the local neighbourhood house or other place in order to get someone to access it. The humiliation, the degradation, the sheer contempt this government holds for people in that situation is quite remarkable.

I also point to another family that I have been working with over recent months, where a mother and two children have been homeless now for two years. The government provided them a house with no hot water, no heating and no blinds on the windows. It was in a desperate state. It was so bad in fact that even with the two weeks rent that they were forced to pay up-front for public housing, they had to leave the house because they simply were not safe and certainly were unable to inhabit it. It is now four weeks after that family was forced to abandon their public housing, and they are still waiting for their rental refund while they stay living in their car. Why? The system has put them back at the bottom of the list again. So the kids are trying to go to school. Mum is trying to find a home. For the $350 refund they are waiting for they have to provide bank statements, they have to provide proof of evidence – everything. As the mother said to me, ‘They actually dealt with me to take the money to put me in a house that was uninhabitable, and now they’re putting me through a four- or five-week process to give me the refund.’ The system needs more resources, Minister, and I ask for your immediate support.