Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the government for the opportunity to respond to the ministerial statement on homelessness. We must—and we do in the opposition—acknowledge all efforts for national leadership to solve what we recognise to be a crisis in the number of homeless people, particularly young homeless people, on our streets every night. My concern is that we have been given a process here and we are no closer to the answers.

It is certainly the case that wall-to-wall Labor governments have failed to provide many of the services to the homeless that it was their duty to do. We gave them money to provide those services under the program the minister has mentioned—SAAP. It is certainly the case that the number of homeless is increasing and the number of young homeless is unacceptable. And it is definitely the case, as we have heard, that people who would never have imagined themselves to be in a category called ‘homeless’ are now finding that they have nowhere to go due to the pressures they are facing with their family budgets—paying for their petrol; their mortgages, if there are mortgages, or rental increases that they cannot deal with; and grocery prices. Many of these groups are not actually mentioned in the recent budget. I particularly would like to mention in my capacity as shadow minister for women the older, single women whom I fear will soon become the very poor in this country. But I guess the last thing that people who are sleeping on the streets tonight want to hear are politicians bickering. As one young homeless woman said to me when I spent a night in Brisbane with the Salvos ministering to young, very energetic boys and girls—I think many of them were—‘Hey, all you do up there is talk.’ So I recognise it is very important that we stop talking and we stop blaming and we come up with a plan for action.

The Prime Minister has made homelessness a very important plank of his new government, and I remind him that this means expectations are now very high indeed. It is important, therefore, for the homeless who have hope and for the services that work day to day with them that these expectations are met. Already we have seen the time line the minister refers to having blown out somewhat. A statement that Kevin Rudd made in January said that we needed a new approach to tackling a very significant problem, the green paper would be a major piece of work that would take into consideration new ideas and it would be followed by a white paper and a plan for action by August 2008. Already we have heard that the plan for action certainly has not been commented on and the white paper itself will not be here until September 2008. So that is more time and not another person assisted in the important way that they need to be.

The green paper has been described by the Prime Minister as a major piece of work. I have to say I have read it and it has clearly been written by bureaucrats. I do not mean that to be critical, but I think it certainly states and restates the problem we are facing with our homeless young and older people. It talks about approaches that have worked in the past. It talks in great detail about the SAAP, possible changes to the roles of state and federal governments and so on. It is very good at describing the causes and the symptoms and providing, as I said, penetrating glimpses of the obvious, but I am concerned that the green paper is not going to lead to the action that we so desperately need.

To back up my concern, I want to quote the principles for change that seem to be at the heart of this green paper:

A national commitment and strong leadership from all levels of government ...

Preventing the causes of homelessness is a main focus.

Social inclusion drives our efforts.

Everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

Safety and wellbeing are a prime concern for all clients.

Rights and responsibilities of individuals and families are paramount.

Joined-up service delivery needs joined-up policy.

Transition points are a priority.

Evidence-based policy helps to shape our priorities for action.

Targets are set to reduce homelessness and hold ourselves accountable.

No-one could argue with any of those statements. They are motherhood statements. They are principles that would certainly work in changing any system that is not working at the moment. Possible targets are mentioned, and clearly they are the targets that you would want to see—a decrease in the number of people moving from public housing and private rental to crisis accommodation services, an increase in the number of women and children remaining in their own homes, a decrease in the number of people seeking crisis accommodation and an increase in the percentage of school aged children remaining at school. Of course all of those are targets that we would expect to see and we would want to see, but there is no pathway, clear or otherwise, from where we are now to where we need to be. There are just hundreds of pages full of, as I said, a description of the problem.

One thing that interests me is the housing aspect. It is quite clear from the Minister for Housing’s statement and from the green paper that a roof over your head and a secure home are the start to your ongoing security about yourself and your world, and services are telling us that more and more people are falling out of the bottom when it comes to finding a place that they can call home. I make the point to the House that I have made on other occasions that, if we are talking about a whole housing supply chain, it does start with the most basic public housing accommodation. People might naturally move from there into affordable rental accommodation and might then save for a deposit on their own home and so on. It would allow others to be looked after at the social housing end of the spectrum. But what I am seeing in my travels around the states is that our state departments are in fact quarantining public housing for social housing tenants, which means those who of course need help most, those who are on welfare, disabled or disadvantaged and often women escaping from domestic violence, are taking all the public housing. There are not enough housing places in our major cities, and that means that the stress in the rest of the rental market is flowing down. When people find they are no longer able to cope, there simply is nowhere to go.

Commented on was the National Rental Affordability Scheme, and I look forward to some evidence that that will actually work. My suspicion is that the incentives will not be taken up by developers building houses, because the requirements and the caveats are so complicated that their fund mangers will simply choose to invest their money elsewhere. That means that, although the program looks good on paper, if it does not result in a new affordable home being built then it really is not providing any answers.

I make the point about public housing—and the minister has criticised me on my statements about this—that it really is the case that over the last 13 years, in spite of I think $10 billion going to the states under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement, not one single additional public house was built by any of our state governments; instead, we have seen the quality of houses and the stock of houses depleted because they are simply getting too old and many of them are no longer liveable. In fact in some cities they are being bulldozed. So we are seen a deterioration in the stock of our public housing, and that has severe impacts on homeless people. I might add, though, that we saw an increase in the administration costs of public housing. The unfortunate pattern continues to emerge where state government public servants have, it would appear, almost unlimited salary increases to manage a program that fails to meet its objectives. It is not fair on those who cannot find an affordable public house, and it is certainly not fair on the homeless.

I hope that in the consultations that we see under this process we have an opportunity to look at some innovative ideas. As I said, they are not mentioned in the green paper. There is a good description of what is happening, but I suspect that the minister may also have had an opportunity to meet with Philip Mangano, from the United States, who runs an operation called the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. He presented some very interesting evidence, which I expect would translate similarly to the Australian example, that we spend enormous sums of money on the chronically homeless but that the kind of money it would take to solve the problem is a lot less than the kind of money it would take to ignore it. He takes an interesting business-type approach to homelessness—he looks after people, he provides all their needs and he demonstrates it is a far less of a cost on the health system.

Perhaps the program of 600 new houses that the minister mentioned could demonstrate or focus on whether this could happen in practice. Six hundred houses is an admirable start, but of course it is very hard to find cheap land to build houses for the homeless because state governments control land management corporations and the object of those corporations is to raise revenue for those state governments; so it is in their interests to be very careful about how they release and supply the land. Making more money for the state government means you cannot find, you cannot produce, affordable land for young people, and it follows all the way down the supply chain to actually build a house. Until we get a different policy where land that should have houses built on it, perhaps even on the urban fringes of our cities—it is controlled by state treasuries, who simply want to maximise their return from it—we are going to be really battling with this issue.

I thank also the steering group that has worked so hard and record my admiration for the Brotherhood of St Laurence, whom I encountered in a portfolio I previously held. Really thanks must go from all of us to those who work each and every day with homeless people and do an amazing job in making their lives mean and matter more each and every day.

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