Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Ombudsman

Social Housing Complaint Handling: Progress Report

Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (16:34): I rise to speak today on the Victorian Ombudsman’s Social Housing Complaint Handling: Progress Report, which was published in March of this year. The message in this report from the Ombudsman is loud and it is damning. This Labor government is failing public and community housing tenants at a time when Victoria is in the grips of a housing crisis. They are blatantly ignoring the advice of multiple reviews and inquiries on how to improve conditions and have been doing so for years now.

The Ombudsman’s office originally tabled its report into Victoria’s public and community housing complaints system two years ago. In that report the Ombudsman described the system as ‘complicated, confusing and under-resourced’. She found that the complaints system was not working and had not worked for years, and this meant that public and community housing tenants, many of whom are already disadvantaged, felt their health and safety was at risk. The Ombudsman recommended that a social housing ombudsman be established as a single external escalation point for all public and community housing renters. The current complaints mechanisms are different for public and community housing, which is confusing for tenants and leads to inconsistent and ineffective outcomes. She helpfully noted that this new model could be easily and cheaply established as a specialist function within the Victorian Ombudsman’s office.

Two years on from those recommendations the Ombudsman’s progress report paints a sorry picture of this government’s efforts to rectify things. Not only has Labor failed to action any of the Ombudsman’s recommendations in the last two years, it has actively ignored them. The progress report reveals that all letters sent by the Ombudsman to successive ministers were ignored, and when a draft of the progress report was provided, the minister responded by saying that the recommendations remain ‘under active consideration’. Where is the accountability and integrity from this government?

While Labor ignored the issues laid bare by the Ombudsman, things got worse for Victorians in public and community housing. Two years on from the original report, complaints about public and community housing to the Ombudsman have risen 83 per cent. MPs from across the political spectrum have seen this trend reflected in our own offices. Many of us have had alarming numbers of public and increasing numbers of community housing tenants contact us because the social housing complaints system has failed them and they do not know who else to go to. These people often have horror stories about life-threatening mould, huge holes in walls or hallways left unclean for weeks at a time with garbage and refuse piling up. All of them will have contacted their local housing office repeatedly and been met with a brick wall. Departmental officers are working beyond their capacity, but there simply are not enough resources for them to address the sheer volume of issues. Every week there seems to be a new news article about the state of disrepair of public and community homes as residents search for new ways to advocate for themselves, as their complaints to the government are falling on deaf ears. They are at their wits’ end, and their trust in government authorities has been decimated.

Despite this appalling state of affairs, the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services reveals that the Victorian Labor government is spending the least per capita on the upkeep of public housing. For years now Labor has stopped investing in maintaining public housing and has let these homes run themselves into states of chronic disrepair, all the while failing to fund the complaints, maintenance and repairs system, so residents are left in inhospitable and sometimes dangerous homes with nowhere else to go. We know that this housing crisis is getting worse, not better. The skyrocketing cost of living is hitting people hard. There are increasing rates of homelessness, and the looming demolition and privatisation of Victoria’s public housing towers is creating immense stress and uncertainty. All the while this Labor government’s recurrent spending on public housing is the lowest per person of any state, and a failure to invest in public housing means that Victoria has the lowest proportion of social housing stock in the whole country.

The government has systematically buried its head in the sand when it comes to regulating Victoria’s community housing sector. Almost three years since the Labor government’s own social housing regulation review, this government has repeatedly refused to make the recommendations public and failed to make any discernible reform towards stronger protection for social housing tenants.

It is not too late to turn things around. The Ombudsman in both reports makes clear what needs to be done to fix the public and community housing complaints handling system. The department and the housing registrar have already taken steps to implement the recommendations directed to them. Now the government must take steps to do its part and make things right. Similarly, Labor must release the social housing regulation review and take concrete steps towards reforming regulation of housing for those who are most vulnerable or else let Victoria slip further and further into housing despair.