Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Homelessness

Ms SANDELL (Melbourne) (12:41): Right now in Victoria we are in a housing crisis. Owning your own home is becoming a completely impossible dream for a generation of people my age and younger. People are being forced to rent long term, but then they face rising rents, fewer rights and the prospect of having to move every year, with no ability to put down roots in a community. We also have a huge number of people who are facing homelessness. People are sleeping on our city streets, in their cars and on friends’ couches, and we have 100 000 people on the public housing waiting list.

But it actually does not have to be this way. Homelessness is not something that we have to live with. We can actually solve it if we have the political will. Governments have spent too long putting homelessness in the too-hard basket. They have let housing become a commodity and an investment instead of something that is fundamentally a human right. Other countries do not do it this way, so it is not inevitable. Other jurisdictions have virtually eliminated homelessness, have built houses for people who need them and have more than 20 per cent of their housing stock as public housing. Yet Victoria has not had a large-scale build of public housing since the 1960s. That is why the Greens have introduced a bill to Parliament to set a target to end homelessness within the next 10 years and to require the government to come up with a plan to reach this target. It is not a pipe dream. Other states around the world have done it. If we set a target, set our minds to it and develop a plan to make it happen, we can achieve a Victoria without homelessness.