Hansard debates

Dr RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (14:05:57) — I move:

That this house —

(1)   notes that on Wednesday, 23 May 2018, the following planning schemes were tabled —

(a)    amendments C118 and C150 to the Banyule planning scheme;

(b)   amendment C157 to the Bayside planning scheme;

(c)    amendment C180 to the Darebin planning scheme;

(d)   amendment C306 to the Melbourne planning scheme;

(e)    amendment C177 to the Moonee Valley planning scheme;

(f)    amendment C170 to the Moreland planning scheme; and

(2)   pursuant to section 38(2) of the Planning and Environment Act 1987 revokes the amendments to the planning schemes outlined in paragraphs (1)(a) to (f).

The intent of this motion is to stop this Labor government's sell-off of our public housing estates. As part of its public housing renewal programs it has tabled planning scheme changes for six of its proposed sites that it cites are for renewal, but the intent and essentially what they achieve is a sell-off of public housing land to private developers.

I know that there are members in this place who will be tied or beholden to the positions of their respective parties on this motion. Regardless of those positions, however you have been told to vote on this motion, I urge you to keep an open mind during this debate so that you can fully hear the reasons why this motion is coming before this house. You may not want to hear the arguments that are dissident with your party position, but I implore you to listen and hear this afternoon. The reason I ask you to do this today is for the 82 000-plus people currently in housing stress and crisis on the waiting list for public and community housing in Victoria.

The people on this waiting list are all of us. These individuals and families — adults, teenagers and children — are the people that this Parliament and successive governments in Victoria have forgotten. I know how the people on either side of this place will respond to this motion. They will claim that each on the other side from themselves have spent X amount of dollars on some sort of solution — crisis response, affordable housing, new and innovative models for affordable housing, they will say — but that it is all too little, too late, because under their watch the problems have got worse. You cannot deny anymore that we need to do something drastically different to the approaches that have been tried before, over and over, and have continued to fail us.

Housing affordability across this country is at crisis levels. More young people than ever before cannot afford a home. Home ownership levels across all age groups are at the lowest levels seen for decades, and the need for housing assistance has skyrocketed. Just last year the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute in their report revealed for the first time the extent of the true and deep housing need in Australia. An estimated 1.3 million households were found to be in a state of need — that is, not being able to access market housing or in a position of stress — and this figure is predicted to rise to 1.7 million by 2025. If you think about that in another way, that is 14 per cent of all Australian households. That figure is staggering, and I say to the people in this chamber, in this Parliament and in parliaments alike across Australia: it is our responsibility to do something about it — because if we do not do something about it, who will?

Let us look at the scale of the housing crisis and the housing problems before us in Victoria, which is what is driving this motion. There are 37 000 household applications on the waiting list for public and affordable housing — 57 877 adults and 24 622 children. Victoria's public housing stock has remained static for the past 20 years at around 65 000 properties, and in that time public housing has declined as a proportion of all housing in Victoria. Victoria now has the lowest proportion of public housing in Australia. That is shameful.

Median house prices in Melbourne are at about $900 000 — a 300 per cent increase since 1995. No wonder we find these levels of housing stress before us. There has been a steady increase in the number of people who find themselves homeless in Victoria, and rough sleeping is estimated to have increased by 70 per cent in Melbourne alone. That covers about 7600 Victorians who are homeless, let alone those who number in the thousands who are the hidden homeless.

In the face of these distressing and despairing figures, what has been the response of this Labor government? The public housing renewal program they announced was supposed to help us address some part of this crisis, but it is actually a program that uses a very cleverly disguised name to sell some of the only land that we have to build more public housing on — the only land that we have on which we need to build more public housing now. Let me be clear: we are in agreement with the Minister for Housing, Disability and Ageing that much of that stock needs renewal, but you do not renew housing estates and say this is going to tackle our waiting lists by selling the majority of the land, thereby reducing your capacity to build public housing into the future. The model is deeply, deeply flawed.

Much of the land that our current public housing stock is built on was gifted to the government of the day or to councils for the explicit purpose of providing more public and affordable housing. We are just learning of the story, for example, of one of the sites in this tranche of renewals at Gronn Place in Brunswick West, which we believe was gifted by a generous person — a local who wanted it to go to people who needed housing support. Imagine what Mr Gronn would think of this now — selling off the majority of that land, which was to have gone to a social good, to private developers so they can make megaprofits.

The reason we are moving these revocation motions is to stop the sell-off of this public housing land and to highlight just how deeply troubled this whole model is. The public housing renewal program is grossly insufficient. It claims to increase the stock of public housing by 10 per cent on each of the sites, but this is so minuscule and does not go any way towards addressing the real problems we see. In fact we will actually see a reduction in the number of bedrooms and therefore the capacity for people to be housed on each of those estates. How is that an increase?

The six developments in these revocations have about 620 public units to be built, up from the current 563. Imagine what you could build on those estates, even if you increased density somewhat, if you did not sell off that land. What a missed opportunity! The government claims that there is an outcome of social benefit for the public, for the community and for residents by introducing a social mix of private and public tenancies, but this is not supported by the evidence. I will expand this further on the basis of the inquiry into the public housing renewal program that was just released yesterday. We have seen previous examples of these types of public-private partnerships for public housing at the Kensington estate, which essentially reduced public housing capacity at Kensington and delivered profit margins of up to 50 per cent to private developers.

There are several other reasons these revocations should succeed and this public housing renewal program should be stopped. Public opinion is against this plan. Over the last couple of weekends I have spent time at two of these six estates — the Walker estate and Gronn Place — and I can tell you that residents are filled with uncertainty, anxiety and distress. Local councils and local communities are outraged that their planning powers and their rights as citizens have been stripped, and most of them want to be able to stand up for their public housing neighbours and friends, who they have grown their communities around.

While some in this Parliament might claim that the revocations are a drastic option, we have the power for this very reason. When we see something that is grossly unjust, unfair and flawed, as a Parliament we have to act, and this house has not been shy in using its powers to move a number of revocations over the last six months for these very reasons. Just yesterday we saw that the inquiry into the public housing renewal program, which was called for by the Greens, supported that with the outcomes of that inquiry and showed why that inquiry was so very necessary — to put the spotlight on the flaws, the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability and the sham that is this program. That needed to come to light. My colleague Ms Nina Springle was on the committee for the duration of this inquiry and has written a compelling and strong minority report that truly highlights the flawed nature of this program.

Firstly, there is the selling of the public land. This is based on a model of selling the majority of each of these sites to private developers to fund the renewals. I will talk more about this later in my contribution, but essentially this goes to one of the deepest flaws of this program — that the government claims it just does not have the money, it only has $185 million and therefore it cannot renew the existing public housing stock if it does not sell the land to private developers.

The current public housing estates are located really well, closely connected to social and community infrastructure and public transport, which is what we know the evidence says is important for good social outcomes for anyone who needs to access public or community housing. The government through the inquiry could not provide sufficient or compelling evidence that it had actually considered alternative models to renew the public housing estates. So on one hand it has said, 'We have no other option', and on the other hand it has not thought of any other option. The question is: why is this the first point of action for this government? Have developers been allowed to shape our program before housing experts, before policy experts and before the community?

The government did not have a sense of how much affordable housing actually would be achieved on each site. For a program that aims to deliver more affordable housing, they did not even know how much affordable housing would be delivered on each site. This goes to show you the lack of preparedness and how this program is not based on evidence. There was no cost-benefit analysis. The government is about to hand over large swathes of public land at discounted rates to developers, and there has been no long-term cost-benefit analysis of the social costs let alone the economic costs of giving this land at subsidised rates, which is what we believe will happen, based on the Kensington report.

This public housing renewal program is largely modelled on a number of pilot projects, including the Kensington redevelopment project, which highlights some very, very serious concerns about the pathway this government is taking. The Kensington report was suppressed by successive governments, and I note that the Minister for Families and Children claimed yesterday that I had grassy knoll conspiracy theories when I cited the findings of the public housing inquiry and what it found through the Kensington redevelopment evaluation. It is not a grassy knoll conspiracy theory; it is research evidence from one of the most pre-eminent research institutions in this country: the University of Melbourne. To attack the evaluation is to attack the research integrity of this institution. That evaluation found the land was significantly undervalued when sold to the developer — one-twentieth of the price, it is claimed; the ratio of public to private housing was not justified and represented a significant advantage to the developer; and the social mix, they claimed, did not achieve the desired outcomes of the renewal project. These findings are alarming on so many fronts, and the suppression of these documents, even right through the inquiry, goes to show that this government does not want a light shone on its really flawed model.

The inquiry also found, very alarmingly, the true nature of the public housing waiting lists in this state. There are 82 499 people now in Victoria that this government is failing by keeping them on endless waiting lists, and perhaps on waiting lists that they will never realise housing from — 24 622 children are on those waiting lists. And yet what is the government's solution? 'We're going to renew some of these housing estates. We're going to provide 1800 more dwellings'. Eighty-two thousand people are waiting, and the solution is 1800 dwellings. The claim that this is addressing the waiting list is completely disingenuous.

The government claims that it wants to resolve a misalignment between demand and supply in terms of how many bedrooms each applicant needs versus what is available in its stock. With tens of thousands of public housing homes and with the renewal program that is earmarking 1800 new dwellings, how can the government claim that it will help align demand and supply by addressing one fraction of the actual waiting list and the actual stock? Once again it is a completely disingenuous claim to say that by increasing public housing by 10 per cent and reducing bedroom numbers across these estates — in the first six estates, for example — it will somehow align a waiting list of 37 000 applicants in terms of demand. I can assure you that on that list of 37 000 applicants there are thousands of families that need three-bedroom dwellings, and we would be able to address that alignment in a much more sophisticated and much more effective way if this government was actually serious about addressing the waiting list.

The consultation process through the inquiry was also found to be deeply flawed, and the inquiry spent a significant amount of time deliberating on how this process could be improved in the best interests of public housing tenants. There was a lack of transparency. There were documents submitted to residents that caused huge distress and anxiety, to the point where the department had to rewrite them. The minister made a pledge that people would be able to return once the redevelopments were complete, but it remains unclear how that is going to be possible when the number of three-bedroom dwellings is going to be drastically reduced and therefore there just will not be dwellings available for the families that want to return.

The planning process was confusing, with several processes occurring simultaneously, which distressed residents, who are already facing very vulnerable situations. Added to them were rehousing and moving complications, layered with a very complex planning process that was foisted upon them with little recourse for feedback. The government has chosen the least restrictive planning mechanism it can find for these sites — a development planning overlay system — and the inquiry spent time understanding why this was the case. Essentially what it will do is give developers the capacity to be able to change their plans later with the least scrutiny possible, with no consultation of the community, essentially giving developers free reign over these estates, which is public housing land.

One of the most serious and concerning aspects of this program, a question that remains unanswered, is about the land value of these public housing estates when sold to private developers. At the Kensington estate, one of the pilot sites for this project, the land was sold at one-twentieth of the market value. The government may claim that there will be a market valuation done and that it will be sold at market value, but what assurances do the public have that this will actually occur? The government must produce evidence that this is not being traded off as a subsidised deal to private developers, therefore forfeiting the public interest. It must do this before it moves any further on any of these renewal sites.

The social housing mix approach of the public housing renewal program also begs a number of questions. The government claims that it is doing this for a number of reasons, including to increase numbers, although by a minuscule amount, but also to introduce a social mix of public and private tenants on each of the sites. As the committee for the inquiry pored over it, the research was clear: if you want to get the benefits of a social mix, it has to be at a neighbourhood or precinct level, so we are talking between 4000 and 8000 people per site. This does not happen on a side-by-side basis with smaller sites, where you have 60 dwellings. The Victorian Council of Social Service itself submitted that the international research evidence suggests that the benefits of the social housing mix have been found in areas of greater disadvantage and of greater densities. That evidence does not apply to these sites. Once again, for the government to use an anecdotal claim that we are going to get a positive social outcome for this is truly disingenuous. The program is not going to achieve those outcomes, but the government will keep holding on to anecdotal claims that it will achieve them to push this program through, which is driven by an agenda that still remains unclear to me. It is not driven by an agenda of truly addressing the public housing crisis in the state.

Very concerningly, the Victorian Auditor-General's Office found too that the Department of Health and Human Services did not have reliable data on the condition of existing public housing stock. So the government says, 'These housing estates need renewal desperately', but actually they have no real record of what needs improvement immediately. I have spoken to a number of residents who claimed that there are aspects of different sites that actually have been renewed quite recently that do not require a wholesale demolition and rebuild. They actually need proper maintenance.

One of the reasons that much of the stock is in need of some maintenance and renewal is because governments have failed to invest in maintaining them when they have needed to. If you run something down, it will break down. You cannot run it down and break it down and then say, 'Look, it's so broken that we have to fix it by giving away public land'. You have to invest in it properly from the very beginning. Once again, the government makes a completely disingenuous claim. The responsibility is on successive governments, successive housing ministers, who have left our public housing to deteriorate to drastic and terrible levels.

Over the last six months we have had a number of revocation motions moved in this house, and for each of those there has been concern expressed about whether this Parliament should use its power to revoke planning scheme amendments. There have been very compelling and significant arguments made about why these revocation motions are necessary, and if there was ever an instance where it was significant and important that this Parliament exercise its power, it is for this purpose — to stop this sell-off of public housing land and the gutting of our public housing system.

I note a colleague, Mr Davis, has cited on a number of occasions that he and his party are concerned about public housing and about the processes underwriting the Markham estate redevelopment. Twice this Parliament voted to revoke the planning scheme permissions for the Markham estate redevelopment, which essentially was another pilot site for the public housing renewal program — the same flawed model, the same poor outcome — and this Parliament said, 'We don't want it, and we're going to vote it down'. I urge those opposite who believed that we had justification to revoke the Markham estate planning scheme amendment to accept that there are no different reasons to not vote that way this time. The same argument is being made, albeit on a much grander and much more significant scale. Because what we are talking about now is the next six housing estates, and once they are done with these six estates, what will come next? This government refuses to answer that question, but we know they are clearly wedded to this agenda. We do not know what deals are being done, but it feels like private developers are making deals behind closed doors with this government that the public are the last to find out about. So with all this evidence before us, with a significant public housing inquiry now completed thanks to the Greens, thanks to us standing up for public housing for the social good in this state, we have to ask: what is driving the agenda of this public housing renewal program?

Just this morning we were debating a motion to ask for greater transparency around another deal, where the AFL were potentially being gifted land to the tune of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars for a project that the government has already committed $225 million to. When the Treasurer was asked about what the value of the land was, he said the work just had not been done yet. So there is $22 million-plus for the AFL and for elite sport, but there is only $185 million for public housing. And let me remind you: that is over years — $185 million spread over the next four years. The government cries poor and yet doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to big corporations. We have had Transurban and we have had Apple. We have had developers, cited in the Kensington report, that made profits of $45 million because of the renewal of the Kensington estate. Is it the role of government to hand private developers huge, exorbitant profits? That is not our role. The government should be governing. We are not corporations. And when the government say, 'We've got to make a return on investment. It's really important that we make a return on investment', I remind them they are not a corporation. They are not making a profit to go back to their shareholders. They are governing for the good of all Victorians, particularly the Victorians that need them the most. Those 82 000 people on the waiting list are the people in this state that need you the most, and you are turning your back on them.

Perhaps what is most distressing about all of this is that this is coming from a Labor government, a Labor government that bandies its progressive credentials around at every turn, a Labor government that was supposed to be there for the people who need them in their times of most need. It was a Labor government that once saw the need for the state's role in providing housing to people in need and massively expanded public housing in the state. It is the reason — and I give credit where credit is due — that we have a number of these public housing estates in the first place. It takes vision and courage for anyone to be able to invest in a social good like this. At one point in history a Labor government had that courage, but no longer.

What each member of the Labor Party today is doing by agreeing to Minister Foley's plans is walking away from their own traditions, their own values and their own party's moral compass. Perhaps that is one of the most disappointing things about all of this. If you want to know why you are losing support, it is because of decisions like this. The public gets it. Every tenant in those public housing estates gets it, and they speak to us over and over again about not being sure about what is going to happen to their lives and asking why the government is leaving them behind. It is because of decisions like this, where you watch one party lurch to the right and the rest of you stay silent, because when you stay silent you too lurch to the right and abandon your moral compass and your values. This is a symptom of how the Labor Party has completely lost its way.

So let us remember $185 million being put aside for public housing by this government when it found $16 billion for a toll road and $7 billion for its West Gate link. It has found money to give Apple their megastore at Federation Square. It has found money to give the AFL a shiny new headquarters, while people sit despairingly on this public housing waiting list, literally in life-and-death situations at times. It is a government that boasts a $1.9 billion surplus, and yet it cannot find money for the people who need it the most.

We have heard from residents over the last few weeks who say they are not leaving their estates. The government is trying to get them out, and they are not leaving. So I ask you: on 24 November when people are in their housing states — at Gronn Place and Walker estate, amongst many others — and refusing to leave, are you going to send the police in to get them out? Will that be the headline on 24 November this year? Because that is what is going to happen. This community is not going to let you give away our public housing to private developers. We will not stand by. We will mobilise, and we will make sure this does not happen.

This is why you have to vote for our motion to revoke these planning scheme amendments. There is still a chance to renew these estates. Revoking these amendments does not stop the renewal of these public housing estates. We can go and renew them now. We have the money. If we had the political will and courage, we could do it right now. Voting for these revocations only has the effect of stopping the sell-off of this public housing land to private developers. We can renew those estates right now.

I urge this government to reconsider its position, to look deep inside itself and see if this is actually Labor's way, because it does not feel like Labor's way at all — or maybe this is Labor's new way. I urge those opposite me who stood for the last few revocations and said this Parliament has a role and a right to intervene when it sees something like this happening, something so distressing that is going to harm many thousands of people, not just now but for generations to come, you can do something to stop it. Vote for the revocation motion today.