Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2024‒25 Budget Estimates

Will FOWLES (Ringwood) (10:37): I rise this morning to make a contribution on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) report on the 2024–25 budget estimates. In particular I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the types of emergency accommodation that are available to those fleeing family violence. There is a report that has been put in the field by the Council to Homeless Persons and Safe and Equal, who together have jointly published a report, and it finds, amongst other things, that family violence is the single biggest driver of homelessness for women, young people and children in Victoria. It is a frightening statement, and it is one that I think warrants close attention from government.

The committee in its report identified that there are a number of gaps in Department of Families, Fairness and Housing’s data regarding emergency accommodation for victim-survivors. Now, if you do not know what is going on, it is impossible to be able to do anything meaningful about it, and I remain concerned that DFFH’s response to this does not reflect the urgency of the problem. In fact whilst DFFH has accepted in principle a recommendation about this, they have said that they are hoping to have a more robust dataset from 1 July this year. I do not know to what extent that work has been progressed. I certainly hope it has been well progressed, but it is important to note that we are still seeing, anecdotally, a very large number of victim-survivors being placed into motels simply because refuge accommodation is full. So DFFH do not necessarily know what the splits are in terms of nights spent or families that have had contact with motels as opposed to refuges, and we know that it is happening. We know it is happening to a very high prevalence, when in fact it should not be happening at all. It was described as a common occurrence in this report, and the Royal Commission into Family Violence indeed found that individuals were being placed into motels while awaiting refuge accommodation and in fact that the majority of women – not just a majority but a startling majority of 95 per cent – had spent part of their emergency accommodation in a motel. That speaks to a very, very substantial problem in this sector, a problem that needs the focused attention of government to remedy.

The committee asked DFFH about the number of women and families who stayed in motels and hotels for more than a week, and their response was that households are coming to motels on more than one occasion throughout the year – more than one occasion. We have data systems that at the moment are still not talking to each other. So this report, which goes back to the previous budget period – it was published in October of last year – said they had data systems that were still not talking to each other, so it is clearly a problem that predates the PAEC hearings. Yet the deadline for getting a more robust dataset – not fixing the problem but just getting a more robust dataset – was not until 1 July of this year.

My concern is that not nearly enough is being done to address this problem. And if you care about it, you should count it. Government needs to look properly at this problem and ensure that victim-survivors, people fleeing family violence, are not shunted into a system that sees them put into wildly unsuitable accommodation like motels. We would all know that motels do not have kitchens. The ability to run often a young family, a small family, out of a motel room is extremely difficult. We need to make sure that refuge accommodation is available, we need to make sure that refuge accommodation is built, and we need to make sure the government is at the very least monitoring, counting and assessing what number of families, and particularly women and children, fleeing family violence are being put into this wildly unsuitable type of accommodation. Safe Steps, a family violence service – this is a finding of the committee – accommodated more people in motels than refuges on average in the six-month period ending March 2024. More people in motels than refuges – clearly massive investment is required and clearly the government needs to do much, much more in addressing this very serious problem and the scourge of family violence.