Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Housing

Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (13:05): The sewerage system in Victoria’s public housing towers has been scheduled for a long-awaited upgrade. With the pipes corroding, raw sewage has been leaking into dozens of apartments across Victoria and exposing residents to bacteria, viruses and parasites. But instead of going ahead with the scheduled upgrades, the Victorian Labor government has just cut funding for them. Labor claim to care about the livability of public housing, and they are using it to justify the planned demolition and privatisation of all 44 of our towers – and yet they have ignored problems for decades, and now they are cutting critical maintenance budgets when people are still going to be living in these apartments for decades to come. This is clearly a deliberate act of neglect not just to save money but to make residents so uncomfortable, frustrated and even sick that they desperately want to move out. It is called eviction by neglect, and there is a well-documented history of governments doing this when they want to get rid of public housing. Instead of abandoning public housing residents in the middle of a housing crisis, the government should maintain and upgrade the public housing we have and build more public housing so everyone has a secure and affordable place to call home.