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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-10-13 Daily Xml
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Homelessness Services

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE (15:12): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding housing for older women.

Leave granted.

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE: In November last year, the minister announced nine home and land packages, ranging between $320 000 and $395,000, in suburbs including Findon, Kidman Park and Woodville West, and construction is expected in February 2020. The minister informed this house last sitting week:

We also have a program that was targeted towards women who might want to get back into the housing market, through a pilot of affordable homes. We set aside nine properties which were, I think, a shared equity product…

I think there may be three contracts either close to or having been signed for those properties…

These homes and the shared equity product were first approved under Labor in 2017. My questions to the minister are:

1. Why was the original approval for these homes scrapped by the Liberal government, only to be reapproved after year of delay?

2. With a minimum deposit, what income does an older woman need to buy a $395,000 home?

3. How many homeless women have that income?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:13): I thank the honourable member for her question. I am not quite sure what she is referring to in relation to a program that Labor had that we subsequently scrapped, but I will ask my department for some more information on that. I think, once again, it's the Labor Party loving to reinvent history and pretend they came up with things.

The original program that we announced in November last year was very much a pilot in terms of testing the capacity of older women particularly to be able to get their foot in the door of a program. What we have found through the program is that—and which is true for anybody who is seeking to purchase a home—you need a deposit and you need a reliable source of ongoing income. What our program has found is that often women in this situation have one or the other, so we are taking some learnings from that to see how we can reprioritise that.

I think I might have been asked about this previously in terms of the pricepoints. The pricepoint was roughly between $208,000 and $260,000 for those particular homes that were made available through that program. The affordability levels for purchasing a property—and I am not about to start giving financial advice, but anyone can look on the websites to get some information about how much income someone needs on a regular basis to be able to purchase a home.

I had something I had written on a post-it note here in terms of the capacity of someone on a lower income. Certainly, people who are on lower incomes would find it much easier, particularly if they go to HomeStart. If they are looking at purchasing a new home, they may well be able to access a range of the grants that are available at the moment. In fact, this is from the popular media so people can take it at face value. For instance, a property with a sale price of $220,000 needs a salary—this is their calculation from Finder.com—of $23,261.

In terms of people who are homeless, I think the honourable member makes some assumptions. We do know that some people when they are homeless, if they have been going through particular challenges, may need to reinstate their Centrelink income, and those sorts of supports, of course, are available to assist them through a range of our program partners in the non-government sector. We do believe that there are a number of people who would be interested in getting their foot in the market.

Some of the community housing providers have specific programs that they also target in the affordable rental space for women who are in similar situations. So there is a range of support available through both the government and non-government partners, depending on where somebody is in their pathway, and we will continue to provide that support.

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