Housing
Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (12:14): (391) My question is for the Minister for Housing. The Productivity Commission’s latest Report on Government Services reveals that Victoria has the lowest per-person expenditure on public and community housing residents of any state or territory. The number reveals that this government is spending the least per capita on maintenance and repairs. This coincides with more and more residents whose homes are crumbling around them. Every day our offices are inundated with emails from people who are at their wits’ end because the department refuses to complete maintenance requests. Life-threatening mould, holes in walls and hallways left unclean for weeks at a time are just some of the conditions people are having to live with. Their trust in government authorities is being decimated. What is the Victorian government going to do to get through the enormous backlog of maintenance requests?
Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for Housing, Minister for Water, Minister for Equality) (12:15): Thank you, Dr Ratnam, for that question and for your ongoing interest, albeit in a selective fashion, in the delivery of housing across this state. It is unfortunate that when you get to your feet you ignore the record funding, not just here in Victoria but out of any jurisdiction anywhere in Australia, to deliver – and this is a total – at least $6.3 billion in housing, both new housing and upgrades and updates, making sure that people have the right and the access to dignified accommodation, a place to call home and somewhere to be proud of.
When you talk about maintenance, Dr Ratnam, it is a somewhat curious swerve away from what is your usual narrative around why it is that our high-rise residential towers deserve billions of dollars of investment when in fact that would only make them habitable and not bring them up to current compliance and design standards. This is where again I do want, in talking to maintenance, which I am about to go into as far as some statistics go, which you may find helpful – albeit perhaps not consistent with the narrative that you take outside this place – to make sure that we have got infrastructure at the heart of what we are doing in delivering.
People will be interested in this statistic – now 9200 dwellings are either complete or underway, a significant update since I last advised the house of progress on this matter. Homes Victoria provides maintenance to around 6400 dwellings, at a cost of about $281 million in 2021–22, and about 350,000 maintenance activities every year. That includes requests from renters and essential safety checks as required under the Residential Tenancies Act. There is a really comprehensive program of renewals, upgrades, planned maintenance and responsive maintenance to ensure that safe and secure homes are at the heart of delivering amenity to renters. We have a responsive maintenance triage system, which basically means that maintenance requests are characterised as urgent, to be rectified in 24 hours; priority, within seven days; or normal, to be rectified within 14 days. Planned maintenance does occur across our housing stock within the public domain. The current maintenance backlog is a 75 per cent reduction in maintenance logs from the last 19 months. We have had a review of approximately 184,000 maintenance jobs; that translated to 93,300 jobs as the remaining jobs were either duplicates or were no longer required. So the current maintenance backlog that we have is about 22,811 cases, but over half of these are being investigated by local housing officers to reconfirm works, with the remainder being with contractors for delivery. So we are prioritising maintenance, we are determined to continue that work, and that is backed up by record funding.
Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (12:18): Thank you, Minister, for your response. It is all well and good to tout some of those numbers, but all those numbers are still making Victoria come last when it comes to maintenance and repairs for public and community housing residents across this state. With over 22,000 requests that have gone unresolved, that is a lot of people who are languishing, waiting for their homes to be habitable. It is almost as though the mass privatisation and demolition of public housing is designed to relieve the government of the responsibility of funding and administering public housing, leaving Victoria languishing at the bottom of the expenditure tables forever. Minister, will there be more funding in this year’s budget for public housing maintenance, or is this a sign the government really is giving up on public housing for good?
Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for Housing, Minister for Water, Minister for Equality) (12:19): Thank you, Dr Ratnam. It took about 13 seconds for you to swerve into the traditional and familiar ground that you have around our record investment in public and social housing across the state. Again, if you had listened to my answer to the substantive question, you would have heard that the remaining works for delivery are being investigated by local housing officers, with slightly under half of those jobs already being with contractors for delivery. It is also not accurate and indeed perhaps a little mischievous, which I would not put behind the convenient narrative of the Greens at basically the expense of facts, to say that these homes are not habitable. I have just talked you through the triage system. I have just talked you through the work that we are doing. When we talk about investment in social housing, it is $6.3 billion, Dr Ratnam. Find me another state that has invested more, and I would be delighted to hear about it.