Wednesday, 3 June 2026

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (10:18): I rise this morning to make a contribution on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee outcomes hearings from late last year. I thought it was important to have a look at these outcomes because as a newly appointed – reappointed – person to PAEC I had good reason to listen to the current Minister for Housing and Building’s assessment of the coming budget and what was said in there, but I thought it was worthwhile to go back and see whether the government had in fact addressed any of the issues that they were encouraged to by the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. I went back, and it was quite depressing reading really, because the government have not only failed to take heed of some of the very sensible recommendations but they have in fact ignored them and have been doing so for quite some time. I would like to read into Hansard just a couple of the recommendations. Recommendation 24, for example, on page 115:

The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing work toward gathering and publishing better data on the demand for homelessness services and changes to the homeless and at-risk populations in Victoria.

They have made that recommendation because there is no publicly available data from DFFH that estimates homeless or at-risk people in Victoria. This government have made much of the amount of money they are spending, but as we have learned throughout this year, just because the Allan Labor government say they are spending money on an issue does not mean taxpayers are (a) getting good value, (b) getting what they think they are paying for and (c) are actually having a problem solved that they want solved. We can look at lots of examples. The most critical one of course is the corruption that has been rife in the Big Build. When the government say they are spending money on an issue but cannot demonstrate any meaningful figures to prove that the money is going to a good cause, then we have a problem.

I would also refer to finding 59, which says:

In 2023–24, 34.4% of specialist homeless sector clients who had a need for accommodation were not provided it or referred to another service for accommodation. Seventy per cent of clients who needed long‑term housing were not … referred to another service.

We also know that throughout this alleged big housing build to address the homelessness issue here in Victoria the rate of homelessness has continued to skyrocket. I refer just to a couple of figures. One is the homelessness figure that was most recently published; it is the highest it has ever been. We continue to reach new record highs in homelessness while the government says it is addressing the problem. Recommendation 61 in this same report says:

While the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing supported the Committee’s recommendation to publish long‑term data on social housing allocations, applications and wait times … it has not yet done so.

It continues to not publish long-term, meaningful data on waiting lists and homelessness in Victoria. The reason this is important, and I will highlight it again, is that as of today 57,372 families – so that is well over 100,000 people – do not have a home to go to. If we had long-term data, we would add another 10,578 families to that list. This government chose about two years ago to sneakily take about 10,000 people off the list and reclassify them, so if we were actually looking at genuine long-term data over the course of this current government, we would see that the homeless waiting list has more than trebled in the term of this Labor government since 2014. It is an indictment on any first world society that homelessness could be in such a bad way and that a government could deliberately and trickily alter the data and the recording of it in order to continue to disguise the problem. The Parliament goes to the effort, through the Parliamentary Accounts and Estimates Committee, to actually make recommendations to provide better data and more information to the community, and yet the current and previous housing ministers here in Victoria have refused to adopt that commonsense approach to letting people know what the situation in Victoria is.