Public Housing, Antisocial Behaviour

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:23): My question is to the Minister for Housing. Does the government evict Housing Trust tenants for antisocial behaviour and, if so, what is the criteria for doing so? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TELFER: On Sunday, the media reported that Mr Dennis Brown of Mile End had endured a range of antisocial behaviour allegedly at the hands of fellow public housing tenants, including faeces being left in his letterbox, an assault requiring 17 stitches, and the house he lives in being set on fire.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:23): I am going to take this question because I want to speak to Mr Brown's circumstances and the challenge around the unsociable behaviour, to put it mildly, that we see in public housing stock in this state. The first thing I would say is that this is an issue that the minister is well versed on; in fact, he gave a rather lengthy presentation at cabinet just this week on this very challenge.

This is a tough one, because we are investing in public housing because we believe it has a role to play but, with statistics that the minister will provide if there's a subsequent opportunity for him in this session of question time, what we have seen is public housing stock and the people who call it their home—the nature of that client makeup has changed dramatically over the course of the last few decades where now effectively people who are getting access to public housing are often having acute needs of their own: mental health issues being chief amongst them.

Where I live in Bowden Brompton, I live next door to Housing Trust. I am surrounded by a mix of private ownership and Housing Trust. Only recently I have borne witness to a property changing over through the death of someone who had lived in their Housing Trust home, as I understand it, going back to the eighties, and now they have been replaced by a young couple. I think it's fair to say that they fit that criteria of being at the most acute end, and it causes enormous disruption in the street. Good hardworking people who have just bought in the area are having their lives turned upside down because they live next door to a really disruptive public Housing Trust tenant, and what do you do?

I think we have got to be alive to evicting people when it is appropriate because sometimes there is literally no option but to evict. But the truth is that we understand and appreciate that evicting people to homelessness isn't particularly a thoughtful strategy. Evicting people, either to homelessness or just moving the problem to somewhere else, isn't particularly useful to the next place that they move.

In my electorate, where we have got a high density of public housing outside of where I live, as many members, frankly, on this side of house know—and on yours too—where we see higher density of public housing this is becoming an increasingly challenging problem. This is why you've also got to have a program to actually invest in other critical services through the Department of Human Services, which the member for Hurtle Vale does, and of course critically around mental health as well, and the Minister for Health will speak in great detail about the investments we are making in this area.

But this is a wicked problem. Anytime you see an instance like the one that the constituent of the member for West Torrens had in Mile End suffering this type of infliction to the innocent, it is gut-wrenching, because no-one should have to experience that in their own neighbourhoods or their own homes, no matter where they live.

The minister, the department and Housing SA are turning their minds to reforms we can make in this area. For one, we do believe that eviction should be a tool that in some instances might more readily need to be applied, but it is also true that you can't just go around evicting everybody all the time, because evicting people to homelessness only makes the problem worse, and as a society we have an aspiration to be better than that. So it is a difficult policy area. It is a challenge we take seriously, and I am sure the minister will be glad to go into detail about some of the measures we are taking to address it.