Thursday, 12 September 2024

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (19:03): (1163) My adjournment debate matter for the Minister for Housing concerns the Haven Torquay project. Funded by Homes Victoria and delivered by a partnership between Mind Australia and The Haven Foundation, it will comprise 12 self-contained one-bedroom units with common kitchen, dining, recreation and meeting areas. The objective is laudable – to deliver affordable and accessible homes for people whose capacity to live independently is impacted by long-term mental ill health – but the proposed location is so woefully inappropriate that it turns this from a fabulous project into a living nightmare for local residents. The facility will be built on Silvereye Street, right next to Torquay Coast Primary School and the Torquay YMCA Early Learning Centre. It is extremely close. As one parent wrote to me:

At 8.45am daily about 200 children sit and wait for the gates to open at the school bike rack, five metres from where the ‘Haven Home’ will be …

The units have no outside area, so residents will spill onto the street, and with the best will in the world, the very nature of these facilities means that on some occasions behaviour including arguments and substance abuse will be manifest. It may not be often, but why risk it at all so close to a school?

It is particularly galling that residents and parents have been kept in the dark about this development. They feel if they had been able to contribute earlier, a more suitable site could have been found. Victorian planning laws provide short cuts for projects developing community care accommodation, and the future use of the site was not announced when it was purchased, apparently due to confidentiality agreements. But it is completely understandable that the consequence of this is that local people feel blindsided and disempowered by this process.

The irony is a far better location exists and is already owned by the state government. The site of the now cancelled Torquay community hospital on South Beach Road would be ideal. I feel enormous sympathy for the residents and parents who were shut out of this process for so long and who see a sensible alternative solution being ignored. The icing on the cake is this: some Surf Coast councillors now disparage those residents and parents raising legitimate concerns as ‘stigmatising mental health sufferers’. That is frankly disgraceful, so I stand with them and with Polwarth MP Richard Riordan in asking the minister to please work with her government colleagues and direct Homes Victoria to reconsider the location.