Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Deputy Speaker, I rise to talk about this MPI on essential services and add my voice in relation to the importance of protecting them. I will touch on housing, but before I do that, I will reflect on the debate we’ve been having around patient transfer care and the inadequate funding and services being able to keep up with patient demands when it comes to transfer to hospitals and the use of taxis. In addition to patient care, I want to give a shout-out to the taxi drivers, because they are not medical professionals. They should not be put in a situation where they are having to provide these kinds of services. I think that’s an important point not to be lost in this debate. We need to be treating everyone with respect and making sure that they are delivering the services and getting the services that they need and deserve.
That’s an important thing when it comes to housing, because housing is a human right and we are in a housing crisis. We’ve got a rental crisis and we’ve got a public housing crisis. There are 5533 applicants on the public housing wait list. That’s a record level for this state. That’s not 5533 Tasmanians: as has been said many times, each and everyone of those applications could have additional dependents, be they partners, be they children, so we’re talking about many, many thousands more Tasmanians who are actually in an incredibly uncertain situation and which is having an impact on a whole raft of elements of their life, whether it be their ability to participate in school, their ability to be productive in the workplace, their mental health, their physical health.
Some of these applicants are waiting for 80plus weeks; record levels where people are waiting to get into public housing. For those who do get into public housing – as we saw a few days ago in the report from the ABC – the quality of the housing stock beggars belief. We have tenants in public housing accommodation having to go to the Residential Tenancy Commissioner to get issues in their properties rectified things such as cockroach infestations, mould infestations, the lack of essential facilities like cooking facilities and showering facilities. It just beggars belief.
We need the government and Homes Tasmania to be model landlords when it comes to the provision of this fundamental housing right, and to see this kind of story being published here, and the caseload of the Residential Tenancy Commissioner having to deal with public housing complaints and concerns from tenancies, is indeed a shame.
It’s also a shame that we have seen this government repeatedly fudge the figures when it comes to their performance in delivering public housing. The target of 10,000 homes by 2032 is a laudable target and we support it wholeheartedly, but you cannot be including vacant land, you cannot be including crisis accommodation in the accounting for the meeting of that target. It simply demonstrates an utter failure to deliver and it speaks for itself. It really is an indictment on this government and its approach when it comes to priorities, because these are choices. This is a choice. It is about priorities and what this government wants to deliver first.
We don’t want to always anchor back to the stadium, but it is a glaringly obvious case in point when it comes to the failure of this government and, indeed, the Labor opposition’s failure of prioritisation of the needs of Tasmanians, when it comes to putting a stadium ahead of the interests of Tasmanians and the services that they need and deserve. The cost of this stadium is not going to end at $1.13 billion. We know there are more elements that need to be delivered, and we’re in the middle of a crisis that is driving up the cost of construction; it’s going to go way beyond that.
When it comes to housing, it also speaks to a failure of this government to properly deal with the private rental market. With rents going up and a lack of private rental housing stock in the first place, renters are being driven out of the private rental market and pushed into relying on essential government services such as public housing. That’s why we Greens are going to continue to loudly and proudly call for a rent freeze so that people can be protected and that unfair evictions are paused in this cost-of-living crisis.
