Thursday, 31 October 2019

 Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (09:39): Homelessness is a real issue in our state and certainly in our cities. Particularly I want to point out that the City of Port Phillip has 1127 homeless persons and sits in the top five local government areas for homelessness out of Victoria’s 80 municipalities. The government has a HousingFirst plan to construct 58 apartments at 46–58 Marlborough Street, Balaclava, using land gifted by the council to make this work. I understand that the total project cost for this will result in those apartments costing around $600 000-plus per apartment.

I am also informed that many of those homeless people will not be able to access the HousingFirst plan because they will be excluded from these projects. The government needs to act to ensure that homeless people are supported, but certainly should not be supporting projects like this that do not stack up. We need a proper solution for homelessness but not supporting private contractors like HousingFirst that ultimately are putting profit first and not the community first when it comes to ensuring we get homeless people off our streets and into homes.