New analysis shows the provision of low-income housing in Australia has effectively halved since the 1990’s. The Community Housing Industry Association wants the federal government to double it’s spending on new homes in its housing Australia Future Fund. CEO, Wendy Hayhurst is asking for the government to be sympathetic.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 So what we've seen that is over since the 1990s there's been an almost 60% reduction
00:09 in the number of homes being available for let. And that's understandable because people
00:14 are staying longer in social housing, they're unable to find something that's affordable
00:20 on their incomes in the private sector. And we're also, because there's proportionately
00:26 less social housing in Australia than there were back in the 90s, the people that we're
00:33 housing have complexities if you like, or just simply they're older or they're people
00:39 with disabilities, they're women escaping domestic and family violence with small children.
00:44 They're not able to hold down the sort of job that's going to pay a wage that will allow
00:48 them to buy or rent in the private sector, so they stay longer than some people might
00:53 anticipate. Given the fact that the government has committed to building more social and
00:58 affordable housing and they know that this is a start, that we need to have an annual
01:03 programme of building social and affordable housing, not one-off programmes, that they'll
01:08 be sympathetic. I know we're in competition with a lot of other people who want services,
01:13 but what I would say is that without housing, without something that's stable, secure and
01:19 affordable, it's really difficult for people to thrive. So they don't make the best use
01:24 of increases in education spending. We're also spending a lot of money on crisis services
01:31 and health services. We know the link between mental health and secure housing. Even physical
01:37 health is improved if you've got a warm house in the winter and one that's cool during the
01:45 summer. So we need to build good quality housing.
01:48 [BLANK_AUDIO]