Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Polwarth electorate public housing

Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:15): (977) My adjournment debate this evening is for the Minister for Housing and Building in the other place, and the action I seek this evening is that I would like to invite the minister to come down to Colac in the seat of Polwarth and to meet with Barwon South West housing workers to discuss the government’s promise some 18 months ago now for 50 new public homes in Colac.

I refer very specifically, as I have on a number of occasions, to the press release put out by this government on 24 September 2023. In that press release the government made it known to all and sundry that as of June 2023 there were 55,800 people on the homeless waiting list, and the minister I am sure is very aware that as of today there are some 63,803 people. Of course my electorate, like most electorates who are suffering this housing crisis brought on by the mismanagement of housing in this state, will well know that another 8003 families are waiting on the waiting list since that promise was made. Some of those 8003 people will in fact be in Colac, and they want to know where these 50 homes are.

The government said that they had announced a billion dollars for some regional housing projects. There was Colac, Wodonga, Shepparton, Seymour and Rochester, and to the best of my knowledge none of those have materialised – none at all. The government said at the time as part of that press release that they were undertaking the due diligence, feasibility and design. Well, no-one in Colac knows anything about these 50 houses. In fact there is general agreement that the land identified in the press release as being on Pound Road was in fact a fanciful notion that was probably never going to happen, because the land simply is not big enough. It is crammed in between a school and a cemetery. Nonetheless we want those 50 homes. The community needs those 50 homes – the 8003 extra families now languishing on an ever-growing waiting list, some of those in Colac.

The other thing that concerns me greatly is that we know families escaping domestic violence are now waiting three times longer than they were only five years ago, and some of those families are in the Polwarth electorate as well. The housing crisis is acute. It is significant. This government has made a commitment to my community to provide extra homes. We have not seen them. We do not know when they are coming, and it would be wonderful for the minister to come down and talk to those hardworking community housing workers that every day have to face up to families and single mums and others and tell them, ‘I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to stay in that motel unit or in that caravan a little bit longer because we don’t have the housing stock.’ So Minister, your visit would be appreciated.