Thursday, 19 February 2026

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (17:13): (1542) My adjournment is for the Minister for Housing and Building in the other place, and the action I seek is for the minister to review public housing sites in Preston and Reservoir, particularly those where there are multiple dwellings, and look into how we are managing those properties that are ageing or reaching their end of life. What actions are being taken, both short term and long term, to ensure that homes can be tenanted as much as possible? Where homes are vacant, sometimes for very understandable reasons, what monitoring and support services are being implemented to address some high-risk behaviour that can take place in those untenanted buildings in order to protect both at-risk individuals and those living in neighbouring homes and the neighbouring community?

I ask that because, in the first instance, Preston and Reservoir do have a large amount of public housing, and some of it is 60 or 70 years old. Some of those buildings are now reaching their end of life – not all of them, but some are – partly sometimes because they have designs that are now outdated for modern use and sometimes because they are damaged, just as can happen with private properties. We as a government are building fantastic, good-quality new social housing and upgrading some of that public housing through our $6.3 billion Big Build. I have remarked before in this place that one of the great things about that work is that the new housing is indistinguishable from private housing. It is often very high quality. I have to be very clear in this place: we are definitely building more of it, and there is certainly more social housing in Preston and Reservoir than when I was elected and indeed when the government as a whole was elected. But we do, as I said, have that challenge that we have older buildings. Some of those older buildings do need to be rebuilt or refurbished in a way that requires people to move out of them for an extended period of time, and when you do that there can be this real challenge, particularly with the larger buildings with lots of tenants in them. Tenancies are not renewed when someone finishes them up. Often those apartments or dwellings are boarded up, and over time you get a smaller and smaller cohort living in those buildings, who are just surrounded more and more by these boarded-up properties.

As we have seen at Eric, McComas and McColl streets and at some parts of the housing between Strathmerton, Boldrewood and Dunolly, we have this situation where a very small number of tenants are left. There are a lot of boarded-up dwellings around them, and we are seeing some very high risk behaviours within those untenanted buildings. I spoke yesterday about some child protection matters that can arise. Also, some drug-related matters can arise. We can have fires, which fortunately our professional firefighters attend to – they do a great job. But all those things are cause for concern both for the at-risk individuals themselves but also for a number of public housing residents who live in those particular areas and have spoken to me about them. So on behalf of those public housing residents I put this proposition to the minister and hope she can take some action to ensure that they can go to their homes and live there safely and securely.