Wednesday, 5 February 2025

 Rikkie-Lee TYRRELL (Northern Victoria) (12:28): (785) My question today is for the minister for housing. In the 2023–24 financial year over 1500 people in the Greater Shepparton region found themselves homeless, many of them families. Unable to secure housing, they turned to caravan parks for a safe place to stay. These parks charge upwards of $600 per week to stay in small cabins. This causes more financial strain on already vulnerable people. Is the government aware of the hardships these families are facing due to the high costs of temporary accommodation?

 Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop, Minister for Housing and Building, Minister for Development Victoria and Precincts) (12:28): Thank you, Mrs Tyrrell, for that question. It is a really important one, because we know that the risk of homelessness, of rough sleeping, is something that causes people an enormous amount of anguish, and homelessness is something which we are working across all levels of government to address. The standard and the benchmark that we are working toward – and it has been really important to be able to work with Minister Clare O’Neil in this space – is that homelessness becomes and remains rare, brief and non-recurring. We know that there are a range of reasons, often involving significant complexities, that can lead to homelessness or otherwise prevent opportunities for people to move into secure housing, and we also know that across that continuum of housing we move from homelessness into crisis and temporary accommodation, then the social housing system is there alongside affordable housing. There is significant work that goes into making sure that we have not just investment in housing stock, because the key to addressing homelessness is more homes, but also a range of opportunities to bring housing online sooner rather than later. That includes modern methods of construction and assistance for people responding to the pressures around natural disaster and the homelessness that occurs in that context.

So we are going to continue to deliver housing. We do have a range of supports that are provided to people to defray and to reduce the cost of transitional housing if they are in a private setting that sits outside of formal supports and case management, but we want to make sure also that within the social housing space we have better access to refuges, for example, for victim-survivors of family violence, for young people and for people who need to stay connected to their communities. I am really happy to give you detail in relation to the areas that you have mentioned and what supports are available. We partner with service delivery organisations, housing providers and a range of councils as well, who are really important supporters and partners in being able to identify where and how people are living rough. Supports, as I said, take a variety of different forms, and that might include financial support, whether it is for people who are presenting to a neighbourhood house for assistance, whether it is about food relief or whether it is about temporary accommodation or indeed that longer term housing that people are looking for.

Again, I am happy to talk through any specific details or examples that you might have, but we do work really closely with our areas across rural and regional Victoria to understand not only where homelessness is occurring and not only where risk of homelessness is occurring but also where rough sleeping exists. The data is really hard to gather, but we do, here in Victoria, have a really broad and open door as part of the allocation of resources into homelessness, which again is significantly higher than other states.