Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The ministerial statement we have just heard was one of the more curious that I have heard in this House, not because the subject is unimportant—it quite clearly is—but because it betrays a sense of talk and discussion and wishing for the future rather than actual achievements. This has become a fairly typical Labor tactic: throw up a minister with a ministerial statement and try to push a story. So today they have thrown up the Minister for Housing and Homelessness and the Minister for Small Business. This is another stunt in terms of the way ministerial statements are being used in this place, and we on this side are bracing for more failures in the homelessness area from a minister who has presided over failed programs, failed policies and other cheap stunts. For example, when Labor was watering down mutual obligation and making it easy for people to get on the dole, he was the Minister for Employment Participation. With a white flag flying high as a sign of surrender to the people smugglers, and while people were being endangered, he was the Minister for Home Affairs. And with the Ombudsman, the National Audit Office and the DPP all noting fraud issues at the Department of Human Services, he was the Minister for Human Services.

Labor stands condemned on the important issue of homelessness. The minister professes his pride not in achievements but in setting targets that we on this side of the House knew were unattainable. At the same time, Labor has allowed five years of the 12 years until 2020 to pass without being able to actually measure any progress in this area. And the government has not committed anything in the budget to the renewal of the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, which is due to expire at the end of next financial year. Similarly, when I looked through the budget trying to find homelessness money elsewhere to make up for this funding stream that is finishing, guess what? I found nothing because there is no other commitment; there is no other money. That is because Labor's homelessness policy is all smoke and mirrors. There is no substance. There is no plan. There is no direction. They have got no idea.

The question the minister should have addressed today is: will those 180 new or expanded services continue to exist? The minister probably does not know, and the government does not seem to care. Labor endlessly repeats the line that it has committed almost $5 billion to homelessness since 2008, yet it cannot explain where this money comes from or, indeed, where it goes. When we look at the funding we see that almost $3 billion of the stimulus funding went to remote Indigenous housing funding, social housing funding and mental health funding. These are all are very worthy programs, but none is directly relevant to the homelessness program. Labor's approach is that any housing measures can be counted as homelessness funding.

The minister complains about the opposition not including the word 'homelessness' in the title of the shadow minister for housing, yet this is a government that has had three different ministers for homelessness in just seven months. And, of course, the current health minister served as minister for housing without any mention of homelessness in her title. So the minister's comment is nothing more than a cheap attempt to score some cheap points.

There are estimated to be 105,000 Australians who are homeless each night. In 2008-09, data indicated that 61.5 per cent of those who sought crisis accommodation, or 330 people—205 adults and 125 accompanying children—were turned away per day. Indeed, the data estimated that only one-fifth of Australia's homeless were in these services at any one time. A severe lack of affordable housing in Australia, and in Sydney more than anywhere else, is pushing families out of the rental market and onto endless public housing waiting lists.

But homelessness goes beyond whether Australians can afford to rent a roof over their heads, with domestic and family violence and family or relationship breakdown leading to the plight of around a third of Australia's homeless. Such issues obviously are not easy to address. The question is how we, as a society, can ensure that those who do slip through the cracks are taken care of.

We do not believe that there are easy answers to homelessness because almost every case is unique. Homelessness involves a set of individual circumstances for all those people who are, sadly, caught in this situation. And sadly, without wanting this to be the case, there will always be homeless people amongst us. Their presence and our response is a test of our compassion as a society. When it comes to solutions, most of the experts in this area say that a multidisciplinary approach is required. We need to do more than give the homeless a bed for the night and a meal. We need to give them a pathway out, one step at a time, solving one problem after the other.

While we must always help those who are homeless, we should aim to address the root causes to help prevent struggling families and individuals from slipping into homelessness in the first place. A key focus is addressing Australia's structural housing shortage, which results in less homes being available for those who need them and higher prices at the lower end of the market for those who can least afford them.

The coalition went to the last election with a homelessness policy based on taking practical measures to ensure the states and territories achieve tangible results, and on helping homelessness service providers focus on the work they do rather than on the administrative burden so often attached to government funding. We are in the process of refining our policies in this area, but an overarching approach will be to address and prevent homelessness by improving housing affordability. Our approach is to solve problems. Labor's approach, it seems, is to create problems and pretend they are fixing things up when they themselves have broken some of them. Only a change of government will deliver positive change for those Australians unfortunately living rough.

Debate adjourned.