Thursday, 30 July 2026

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (18:40): (2662) My adjournment this evening is to the Minister for Housing and Building, and the action I seek is that they meet with the residents committee at 25–27 King Street in Prahran, the public housing tower. I have been contacted by residents of that public housing tower, who have grave concerns about the government’s plans for their homes and questions about the process and relocation and the impact that it is going to have on their homes and their rights to housing into the future.

Some of the issues that residents have raised with me include the uncertainty that they have about the rental payments that will be due when their public housing switches to being operated by a community housing tenant. They have seen contradictions between information that they have been provided with. In essence, they have been provided with a brochure that states that rent would be at 25 per cent of income and fee free with no qualification. However, they have subsequently heard that narrowed down in conversation, and they want to know what their actual rights are: what they were told in conversation or what they have in writing on the brochure. They are very concerned about the state’s apparent abandonment of the over-55s dedicated housing model, and they would like to have assurances around the continuation of that model and confirmation of the government’s position.

They have also raised that they are concerned around the erosion by the government’s policy of the right to public housing as a choice. The right to return is frequently put up as a defence of the government’s public housing program, but the residents at King Street want to say to the government that they should be formally entitled to choose between public housing and community housing. That choice is essentially hollow when the government has a policy of not replacing public housing stock when it is refurbished, instead converting it to community housing stock site by site. The residents say soon there will not be anything left to choose between, and so it is illusory to say that they can still have access to public housing when the government seems committed to eroding public housing stock. They want to know how the legislated public housing portion across the Big Housing Build is designated in law. That requirement, they observe, is statewide, not site specific, so they suspect it can technically be satisfied by allocating public housing to some rural area that is far away from the community that they know and love and have set down roots in. There are a number of other points that the residents have raised and concerns and confusion that they face as they go through this process, and so I reiterate: it would be very much appreciated by the residents if the housing minister could make themselves available for a meeting.