Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In Frankston, there are 2,090 social housing dwellings, yet, at the same time, there are more than 2,000 households on the social housing waiting list for the Frankston area. We can be in no doubt; there is a real and growing crisis in affordable housing, in affordable rent and, commeasurably, in homelessness in our country, and I'm sad to say that crisis has touched my electorate of Dunkley. In my area, anyone who walks around the streets can see there has been a visible increase in the number of people sleeping rough. But, of course, they're just the people that we can see. There are many, many more people who are in precarious and unsafe housing, who are couch surfing, who are staying in people's backyards, who are jumping from home to home, and who are having their income gouged by rooming houses where they're not safe. These rooming houses have sprung up across Dunkley and in many other places to fill the gap in affordable housing.

In my electorate, there's no youth crisis accommodation, no youth transitional housing. Some 4,000 young people aged 15 to 24 years in the Bayside Peninsula area were accessing homelessness and support services in a year. Of these some 4,000 young people, twice as many are women as men. It's not just young women who are disproportionately impacted by the crisis in affordable housing and homelessness we're experiencing in this country. On census night, 61 per cent of people supported by specialist homelessness services were female. Women's homelessness rose 27 per cent between 2001 and 2016. Almost 50,000 Australian women experienced homelessness on census night in Australia in 2016. We are a rich country. We are a successful country. That is not a number that we can be proud of and it's not a number that can continue. Because it's not just a number; it's people. Almost 50,000 women experiencing homelessness on one night is not acceptable. Every day, Australian homelessness services turn away 155 women because of a lack of affordable houses. Women over 55 are the fastest growing cohort of people experiencing homelessness in Australia. Women who have worked all their lives, women who have taken time out of the workforce to care for their children, single parents, decent Australians—women over 55 who are homeless. We cannot stand for this. We cannot let it continue.

During the election campaign, I met two gorgeous women, Pat and Coral, who live in Carrum Downs. Were it not for Haven; Home, Safe, they would have continued to be part of the large group of Australians over 65 paying unaffordable rents—a group which has increased by 42 per cent since 2011. Pat and Coral are great, decent Australians who would have been on the brink of homelessness had it not been for Haven; Home, Safe, who have been working in the area of providing affordable housing and transitional housing for vulnerable Australians for 40 years. One of their developments which is almost finished is in Carrum Downs in my electorate, the Wattlewood development. It has been built by a terrific local business, Bevnol Homes. It is an $80 million-plus private property development with 237 lots of residential subdivisions and 100 new affordable housing units, and it will be open next year.

We need more of these sorts of developments. We need a real plan from the federal government to support the construction of affordable homes, to support build-to-rent construction. It's not enough just to talk about putting a positive spin on homelessness. It's not enough to say, 'If you have a go, you get a go.' We need a federal government that will invest in affordable housing, support people like Pat and Coral and support organisations like Haven; Home, Safe to continue to do the terrific work to help people in my electorate and across the country.

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