House debates

Tuesday, 4 December 2018

Statements by Members

Homelessness

1:56 pm

Photo of Andrew LamingAndrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

It's a tough life being Queensland housing minister Mick de Brenni—all that finger pointing you've got to do! I found eight people living in permanent tenting in my city. Every Australian deserves to have a roof over their head, and every state housing department should be providing it. Listen to the Labor explanation for homelessness: they call upon me and the Prime Minister to make state public housing more affordable. Mick de Brenni blamed the Commonwealth for unfair tax breaks, accused the Commonwealth of having no plan for Queensland housing and said the cuts to Aboriginal housing had a flow-on impact to inner-city Brisbane. Mick de Brenni, the housing minister in Queensland, cancelled the $800 million Logan renewal initiative—2½ thousand homes for people like Kerrin that I met with. Young men in Queensland wait seven years for a roof over their heads—they live in a tent and have their cat confiscated—and the state bureaucrats can't even manage a referral to a state-federal funded housing provider like Micah. There is no referral for Kerrin, no case officer at state housing, and Mick de Brenni, so busy over cappuccinos, is pointing the finger at Canberra.

1:58 pm

Photo of Stephen JonesStephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | | Hansard source

Every Australian deserves a roof over their head, but no Australian deserves the member for Bowman as their local representative! With all the problems going on in their party room over the last week, with all the problems on display, you'd have thought they'd have a lot more to do when they came into this place than complain about what is happening in another tier of government. The people of Queensland have already voted on their state representative. The message for the member for Bowman and all of those other regional Queensland representatives is: look to your own backyard. You've got plenty of problems with broadband and the National Broadband Network. You've got plenty of problems with housing affordability but not a policy to bless yourselves with. You've got plenty of problems when it comes to the delivery of healthcare services but not a policy or an initiative to bless yourselves with. So instead of coming into this place, day after day, and puffing yourselves up and blaming another tier of government for your own electoral failures and your own policy failures, look to your own backyard and your own party rooms—because you've got much bigger problems to deal with on your side than trying to fix the problems of another tier of government.