Thursday, 20 June 2024

Housing

Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (18:51): (981) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Housing. Recently Louise Goode had to watch her Thornbury home of 25 years be demolished. She had fought fiercely for years to get her home back after being evicted. The emotional toll of being evicted has been incredibly high for Louise, who grew up in foster homes. This house represented the first real place of stability and belonging. To watch it be demolished has been heartbreaking for Louise, her neighbours and all those who joined her fight.

Louise is not alone. I have recently written to you about a constituent named Iman Minas, who resides in public housing in Coburg with her two children. Iman told me that the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing wants to evict her family from their home of 13 years. She is absolutely devastated because she has made a stable and loving home in this neighbourhood, where she is surrounded by supportive neighbours and her doctor, support services and her son’s school. Iman’s youngest son has autism and requires significant care, so stability and access to these services and this school are of vital importance. The department has told Iman that she must move to a smaller house because her older son is moving out and this house is apparently transitional housing. But Iman says her son may have to move back in again if he cannot find other stable accommodation and may stay with her occasionally to provide extra care and support. Given the dire state of the private rental market, especially for young people, these are very real considerations.

It is frankly inconceivable that the department can just evict someone from their home without reasonable cause when they have lived there for over a decade. Iman says this process has caused her immense stress and she feels depressed as a result. This is the human cost of public housing relocations and the inevitable result of treating housing as a commodity, not a right. Just imagine a world where the state government intervened and allowed Louise, for example, to stay in her property as a public tenant. That world is possible.

Public housing tenants experience forced relocation as displacement. Studies have shown that this process has serious negative effects on people’s health, wellbeing and social cohesion. The impacts reverberate through tenants’ lives long before and after a physical move. We have seen this many times here in Victoria. Every time this Labor government demolishes public housing estates, people are uprooted and separated from their communities. They are given limited options, and many are pressured into housing that may not suit their needs.

As Labor now plans to demolish Victoria’s 44 remaining public housing towers, we are going to see more of this. We have already heard from many residents that they have signed documents without interpreters, that they have been offered housing far away from their community and that they have been offered only community housing and not public housing. Minister, these alarming relocation practices must end. I ask that you start by ensuring Iman can stay in her Coburg public home.