Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Housing

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:34): (1377) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Housing and Building, and the action I seek is for the state government to urgently address the public housing crisis that it has created in Victoria and provide practical, implementable solutions to fix this terrible situation effectively and quickly. I am asking the minister to address this immediately. I want to give some personal stories here that are just about very recent events over the last few days prior to arriving here in Parliament. On Monday this week a mother with her two young children arrived at my electorate office because they had become homeless that day. The lady they were staying with, her lease was up. She was moving out. This lady had no lease and nowhere to go with her two children. She arrived at my office, and we had nowhere to send them because WAYSS has got this standard response – and I have heard this now from many people – of ‘Sorry, we don’t have anything that we can do.’ It is simply not good enough in this government to have nowhere for young Australians and single mothers to go with their children. That was on Monday.

I want to give you another example. On Friday last week at McDonald’s in Berwick there was a young teenage girl. A constituent of mine happened to see her along with her friend and thought that she looked a little bit dishevelled and very upset. They asked her: ‘How are you? Are you okay?’ and she burst into tears. This teenage girl, trying to go to school, had nowhere to live – nowhere to go that night. She gave the name of where she goes to school and the constituent followed up with the school to see if she had turned up on Monday. They discovered that she had not. We discovered that she was a good kid that turned up to school regularly, all the time, and who had lost her job as well. She had been keeping a part-time job, but she had no way of washing her uniform, and she could not go to work clean because she had nowhere to live. This is a common story in my area of the south-east. I have met person after person with these terrible, terrible stories. They are just desperate for housing. What is this government going to do? What is it going to take? This government has failed Victorians in housing. We need that housing. We need somewhere for these young people and these mothers with children to go. It is appalling.