Mr BAYLEY (Clark) - Mr Speaker, I thank the member for Bass for bringing on this important matter of public importance today. To state the obvious, I am new to this portfolio and I look forward to meeting with stakeholders and everybody in the community sector, and working across this Chamber to deliver good outcomes and to continue the Greens' strong legacy of support and delivery in this space. The community sector services is a broad reaching portfolio and touches on many aspects of Tasmanians' lives.
It is important to take this opportunity to point out the ministerial mea culpa delivered just post-Budget, that the community sector's needs and aspirations and requests for funding were not met in this current Budget. To deliver, the community sector needs proper funding and it needs to be indexed to keep up with inflation and other increasing costs. Given it is Homelessness Week, it seems timely to focus on what can be done to prevent homelessness. In particular, I want to discuss a HousingFirst approach to homelessness. The HousingFirst approach is both an obvious policy approach and a transformative one. In a HousingFirst approach, the first thing you do is give a person stable, permanent accommodation, then you provide a range of personalised services. These supports are service and engagement. Engagement with these supports is in no way a requirement to continue to be provided with housing.
The exposure draft of the Tasmanian Housing Strategy makes much of the Government's purported adoption of Housing First. It is a laudable goal and in fact it is Greens policy. Unfortunately, it is not a simple policy proposition. There are currently 4598 applications on the Housing Register and the rolling average to house priority applicants has now reached 80 weeks. Both of these statistics have undeniably been on a steep upward trend under this Government.
It is an undeniable fact that we need a significantly different approach to housing to implement a Housing First approach. What is this Government committing to that is different? Nothing. One of the repeated themes in this draft strategy is planning reform. Planning reform, it seems, is the only approach to addressing the housing crisis that is ideologically palatable to the Liberals. Unfortunately the reality does not match this Government's palate. The draft strategy makes much of balancing access to affordable housing with the profits of property investors. It is this sort of attitude that has firmly entrenched a trajectory that makes Housing First impossible to achieve.
The Government's attitude towards housing and homelessness needs to change to achieve this policy objective. Part of what the Government needs to change is actually caring about resolving the housing crisis. It seems that all they care about is spinning away from the problem and using it as a stalking horse for planning reform. It is the Government's proudly claimed policy to invest $1.5 billion over 10 years to build 10 000 homes that I take umbrage with. This would be an average of $150 million a year, yet despite this the latest Budget has only allocated $87 million this year, escalating to $98 million in the last year of the forward Estimates.
In addition, in excess of $10 million per year of this money is for initiatives that are not for construction of new housing as well as funding to cover off debt services of between $10 million and $20 million per year that Homes Tasmania will have to pay for thanks to the restructure. All summed up, the Government will be funding less than half of the annual requirements of their $1.5 billion plan each year. This is all assuming that each home can have land secured, construction funded and all associated services and costs funded for an average of $150 000. We have all heard big promises of the number of homes this Government has, will, and are building. The facts are that according to the Productivity Commission there are only 303 more social houses than there were in 2013.
This is not the track record of a government who has earned the benefit of the doubt. In short, to adopt a Housing First policy this Government needs to put housing first, not short-stay deregulation, not investment properly tax breaks, not making an expensive bells-and-whistles stadium in their policy. As it stands, Tasmanians can have no confidence that this Government has any intention at all of adopting a Housing First approach to homelessness and they have no intention of building 10 000 social and affordable homes.
All of these promises are hollow and the Government is using them to avoid dealing with the housing crisis so they can focus on distorted priorities like a shiny new stadium. On behalf of the Greens, I call on the Government to put their money where their mouth is and genuinely deliver on a Housing First policy approach to homelessness.
Dr Woodruff - Hear, hear.
Matter noted.
