Wednesday, 14 August 2024

Housing

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (12:36): (619) My question today is to the Minister for Housing, and it relates to the housing project planned for the former Yarra Valley Water tank site at 421 Upper Heidelberg Road, Ivanhoe. It is a significant piece of state-owned land in a prime location. In the Labor government’s consideration of the development of this site, did you as minister advocate for it to be a social housing development?

Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for Housing, Minister for Water, Minister for Equality) (12:36): Thank you, Mr Puglielli, for that question and for the work that you have correctly identified as being part of a whole-of-government initiative to address housing shortfall.

The site that you have referred to is actually sitting with Development Victoria, and one of the things that I want to perhaps take you to and take the chamber to is the interaction between the work that Development Victoria and the Minister for Precincts do alongside what I outlined to this chamber when the housing statement first became something that I was partially working to deliver in the housing portfolio. We have across the board a number of ministers who are responsible for the housing statement. They include the precincts minister, Minister Brooks, who works with DV, and the work that I am doing across social, affordable, crisis accommodation and transitional housing and also an element of affordable housing. Minister Tierney in regional development is doing the worker accommodation work alongside the regional housing build. So when we talk about sites like this, there is a discussion about a proportion of those sites that can be allocated to, for example, affordable housing. Again, I do not want to speculate because of the land that is still yet to be determined for a number of sites that are part of the work of DV. That includes the work that I am doing to advocate for social housing as part of what we deliver across sites that are in the remit of Development Victoria.

I regularly, routinely – and I would hazard a guess that some people might say ‘incessantly’ – advocate to colleagues and to the Commonwealth around making sure that we can deliver social housing across as much of the stock that is being developed. This is where the development facilitation program comes in. It is where the work associated with the short-stay levy comes in. It is about making sure that when and as we develop sites, we are doing so with a view to providing housing to people who are vulnerable, people who are key workers, people who are looking for private market rentals and people who want to move into home ownership. So when I answer your question, and I hope that I have given you a sense of my engagement to date, I just want to leave it abundantly clear to you that I am regularly driven to conversations about how we can include social housing across as much of the development that we are doing around the state as possible to make sure also that people in social housing have access to the sorts of homes that we should all have access to as we lean into those dual challenges and blockages of affordability and availability.

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (12:39): Thank you, Minister, for your response. To my understanding, as of yet there has not been any clarity as to whether there will be a specific amount of social housing designated for the site in question, so in your remit as housing minister could you tell the chamber why as of yet there is no specific amount of social housing designated for this key piece of state-owned land?

Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for Housing, Minister for Water, Minister for Equality) (12:40): Mr Puglielli, I went to this briefly in my answer to the substantive question. It is yet to be determined in terms of where and how those configurations of apportionment will end up. What I can assure you, though, when we are talking about those – it has been termed in sporting nomenclature as ‘MCGs worth’; I am not a sporting person but it seems to make sense to other people as a unit of measurement – 13 MCGs worth of land being brought onto the scene as being able to deliver housing, I am advocating for as much of that to be social housing as possible. Because we do need to make sure when we are delivering on this social housing – and we are talking well beyond the 12,000 in the Big Housing Build; we are talking up to around 18,000 social housing homes across a range of different programs – that the homes are situated in communities and that they are well appointed and well connected. I will not stop doing that work; that is my job, and I take it really seriously.