Thursday, 3 April 2025

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (17:27): (1117) My adjournment is for the Premier, and the action I seek is that relocation officers cease coercive practices to force public housing residents out of their homes. The Minister for Housing and Building claims that each resident will be assisted to find a new home that matches their needs and preferences, but residents tell a very different story. North Melbourne residents received a letter warning them that if they do not accept one of two offers, they will be moved to the register of interest – housing purgatory for the 125,000 people already on the waitlist. Residents in Richmond say relocation officers threatened that they will be left with only run-down, unsuitable or faraway homes if they do not accept an early offer. A Flemington resident said that he and his mum, who need disability modifications, were told they had to accept an inaccessible home. One of my constituents, an elderly woman living alone, told relocation officers she did not want to move out of the community that she had lived in since arriving in Australia decades ago as a refugee. But over the last year Homes Victoria moved out all of her neighbours. They stopped maintenance and they let piles of broken furniture and rotting rubbish build up in the hallways and in front of the lifts, forcing her to climb flights of steps just to get in and out of her home. With a mostly empty floor, someone tried to break into her apartment at night, and when Homes Victoria moved out the last of her neighbours on the floor, she felt unable to stay.

The conditions that this government created around her home are just one of the deliberate tactics employed in this inhumane process that the government calls relocation. But the biggest coercive tactic of all is the so-called right of return. Residents have continually been told that they have the right of return, as though the new homes that are being built are for them. But residents have not been told that actually there will be no public housing rebuilt at these sites at all and there is no guarantee of a suitable home. The Law Institute of Victoria has just come out saying that the government’s communications to residents may contravene the government’s own relocations policy and that in reality the policy does not guarantee residents the ability to return to redeveloped sites. Residents’ rights are being trampled to meet an arbitrary deadline for ‘decanting’ the building – the heartless term that this government uses for forcing people out of their homes. These unethical, rushed and senseless relocations must stop.