Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Housing

Chris CREWTHER (Mornington) (19:13): (867) My adjournment is for the Minister for Housing. The action I seek is for the minister to provide an update on the Labor government’s plans to fix Victoria’s housing and homelessness crisis. Victorians are struggling to secure stable housing. They are facing ballooning public housing waitlists, stagnating social housing, more taxes, higher rents and insufficient new housing supply, with the dream of home ownership becoming harder, especially for young people. Particularly with higher land tax, mum-and-dad investors and others are getting out of the rental market. That means less rentals and higher rents. Not only are people struggling to buy homes but they often cannot get into rental homes or afford rents. For example, a local mum I know lost her accommodation as her landlord had to sell, and she could not find anywhere to go. Now she and her three kids have been placed in emergency housing 1 hour away from their schools. Another couple with five kids who run a business locally and set up festivals have been struggling financially due to a WorkCover incident. They could no longer afford rent and faced eviction. They could not find any alternative affordable rent after applying for so many properties. At the last minute they found an affordable Airbnb, but they are now in limbo, going from Airbnb to Airbnb to avoid homelessness. Even with Airbnbs, families like this will soon face more costs with the Labor government’s new short-term accommodation tax passed through to them.

These are some things I saw growing up in Horsham, but it is much worse now. On housing supply the Labor government had announced building 80,000 new homes a year over a decade, but the most homes Victoria has built in 12 months is under 70,000 homes in 2017. Home approvals in 12 months to July this year were only about 52,000. There is a long way to go to get to 800,000 builds. Meanwhile Victorian rents have gone up more than 10 per cent in 2024 alone. The public housing waitlist has ballooned to over 61,000. Homelessness has increased by thousands, with the Mornington Peninsula having the fourth-highest level of homelessness in the state. A leaked report shows the number of public homes managed by Homes Victoria fell by 446 in the last half of 2023. We have reports that the Labor government is stockpiling rental properties in a move experts warn will force rents up, and since Labor’s Big Build we have seen a net loss of 3500 public housing bedrooms. These are not empty figures; these are mums, dads, friends, grandparents and young people, all struggling to survive.

Housing is not merely a roof over one’s head; it is everything. Lack of stable housing is linked to increased inequality, depression, anxiety, unemployment, obesity, lack of productivity and much more. Housing gives people a better quality of life and cohesive communities. We need to do much more on this issue.