The Turnbull Government cannot continue to ignore the homelessness and housing affordability crisis gripping the country, says the Member for Macarthur, Dr Mike Freelander,
With Homelessness Week 2018 (August 6-12) starting today, Dr Freelander is calling on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull must outline his plans to address the 116,000 Australians who are homeless on any given night.
“On Census night in 2016, more than 116,000 of our fellow Australians were homeless – an increase of more than 13 per cent in the period since the 2011 Census,’’ the local Labor MP said.
“In NSW the 2016 Census revealed 37,715 people were experiencing homelessness.”
The number of older women and young people experiencing homelessness continues to rise across every jurisdiction in Australia.
Dr Freelander said the Turnbull Government does not even have a dedicated housing and homelessness minister, highlighting its indifference to this complex social issue.
“Housing affordability is just getting worse and it is widening intergenerational inequality,” Dr Freelander said.
“The more unaffordable housing is, the more likely those at the bottom of the market fall into housing stress and homelessness.
[social_quote duplicate=”no” align=”default”]“Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull wants to give big banks and multinational companies an $80 billion tax cut, further increasing inequality in Australia.”[/social_quote]
Dr Freelander says that if elected, Labor will:
- Develop and implement a national plan to reduce homelessness through the Council of Australian Governments.
- Provide $88 million over two years for a new Safe Housing Fund to increase transitional housing options for women and children escaping domestic and family violence, young people exiting out-of-home care and older women on low incomes who are at risk of homelessness.
- Reinstate a Minister for Housing and Homelessness, and re-establish the National Housing Supply Council.
- Reform negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, along with other reforms to improve housing supply and affordability.
“If Mr Turnbull put half the effort into housing and homelessness that he does trying implement tax cuts for his mates at the big end of town, Australia would be a much fairer place to live,” Dr Freelander said.
Thank you for caring
Sonya Moulang
Shining Stars Foundation Street Outreach Service
Thank you Ricardo Carlo Lonza that is great news good on Mike Freelander it is a very bad situation out there
Paul Mackin
100% this needs more attention.
So many groups out there feeding and trying to help so many people every single night.
It breaks my heart.
Mike Freelander MPMike thankyou for talking up.
Let’s not let this spiral any further out of control!
The rapidly growing crisis of homelessness in our society is the convergence of three issues The Coalition Government continued sale of welfare homes and the cut in construction of new homes, the growth of domestic violence that forces so many women to leave their homes, and the growth of older people caused by the baby boomers that will see the proportion of aged in our community the rise to some 35% of the population with a majority being women. The current explosion of this problem could have been foreseen but the current Coalition Government decided to let the “market” fix the problem only to see the price of housing rise so that the rate of homeownership in the under 40’s to fall to the lowest since the depression and most older people being excluded from the rental market. If the government used any surplus land holdings to build welfare housing and not flog it off to their developer mates but built reasonable homes for welfare and essential workers.
Unless some radical actions are taken we will end up having our streets occupied by the homeless like the third world countries to our shame particularly as we are supposed to be a rich country but only for the wealthy.