Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight 175 CEOs will sleep rough in the corridors of Docklands Stadium in Melbourne to raise money for the St Vincent de Paul Society. The event is also being staged to raise awareness of how it feels to sleep rough in the middle of Melbourne. On any night around 2,000 people in Melbourne will go without safe and secure housing. They are either couch surfing with family and friends, living in registered boarding houses or sleeping rough on the street. Across Australia nearly one in every 200 Australians is homeless. One in every 154 Australians sought help from a homelessness assistance service and one in every 39 children aged under four slept in a homelessness service. Twenty-three per cent of Australia's homeless are children. These are shameful statistics.

Today I would like to pay tribute to and thank the people in Melbourne who work hard to, literally, make beds for those without. Each of these services tackles homelessness from different angles. Ozanam House, as well as providing crisis accommodation and referral services, has recently developed a homelessness action group in conjunction with community members to better inform the community about homelessness. They have produced a guide for community members to assist people they may find in north or west Melbourne sleeping rough. The guide tells people who they can call, what services they can refer people to and how they can help someone without secure housing. Many members would be familiar with the work of Bryan Lipmann, who has provided services at Wintringham—not for homeless older people but for older people who are homeless, a critical distinction that has enabled him to establish a successful model for the provision of care to older people.

Urban Seeds is a great community enterprise in the CBD. I was privileged to join a dinner with a number of fellow Melburnians, cooked by the volunteers and members of Urban Seeds. Their motto, 'Strangers are fiction', asks us all to remember that people are always only one conversation away from each other.

Finally, Urban Communities has transformed the way affordable housing is offered to people in Kensington through a new model of management. Internationally, our public housing models are outdated. Urban Communities has provided one alternative and, in doing so, has provided affordable housing to women at risk of homelessness resulting from domestic violence and men at risk of homelessness from mental illness. I will be here in Canberra and not able to join the CEOs and the foreign minister this evening as they do their bit for homelessness in Melbourne.

I would again like to thank the people who tirelessly offer services to Melbourne's homeless. Housing stress has increased in the last decade. In Melbourne, 52 per cent of people rent their homes as private rentals swell above 30 per cent of people's family income. Waiting lists for social housing continue to grow and, despite the injection of funding for social housing in Melbourne, we are seeing land tagged for private development rather than affordable housing. This is something that I and all the members of the various community groups I have mentioned in Melbourne are working hard to address.