Queensland Greens MP Michael Berkman says the scale of the state’s housing crisis is being masked by government measures that have excluded potentially “thousands” of applicants from joining social housing waitlists.
The Queensland parliament’s community support and services committee tabled a report on Friday afternoon, exploring housing models in Sydney and Melbourne.
The committee’s chair, Labor MP Corrinne McMillan, said the challenges facing Sydney and Melbourne were similar to housing pressures in south-east Queensland. She called for a coordinated response from all levels of government, as well as the not-for-profit and private sector.
“Here in Queensland, when new suburbs are designed, there needs to be a consideration of social-housing provisions and supports by local councils when approving development applications,” McMillan said.
“Further investigation is required of local councils’ responsibility, participation in, and the barriers to supply of housing, including more social and affordable housing in Queensland.”
In a dissenting report, Berkman said problems with housing in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were driven by common factors, including the commodification of housing and policies that treat housing as a vehicle for wealth creation, rather than a human right.
“These common features are essentially the backdrop for the housing crisis that each of the New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland governments is perpetuating, through their failure to implement meaningful rental reforms and the dramatic underinvestment in social housing,” Berkman said.
Citing figures from the state parliamentary library, Berkman said changes made to social housing eligibility criteria in 2019 had meant that the waitlist has excluded potentially thousands of people.
The current waitlist for social housing is about 31,000 households, up by 78% since 2018.
The parliamentary library figures show that since 2019, Queensland has only accepted applications from people in a “high-risk” category.
“Excluding countless people from the social-housing register – people who need housing support and would previously have been eligible – effectively mask[s] how many people are being let down by the government’s failing social-housing policy,” Berkman said.
“Further, I believe there has been a concerted effort to obfuscate these changes, to the point of repeatedly misleading parliament when asked about this issue in both the last parliament and the current term.
“Key stakeholders in the community housing sector have been telling us about the consequences of these changes since 2019, and the data paints a clear picture of exactly when and how the changes to the [eligibility criteria] have excluded people from the social-housing register who would have previously been eligible.”
Based on numbers of applicants in previous years, Berkman said the number of applicants deemed ineligible by the new rules would be “in the thousands … and the housing crisis has only worsened since then”.
“No matter how hard the government tries to hide the problem, the number of people waiting for social housing has continued to grow,” he said.
The committee report said Queensland had experienced unprecedented growth in recent years, which had in turn placed pressure on housing supply through increased demand.
In 2021, Queensland had its highest net interstate migration since 1994, with 40,619 people moving to Queensland, the report said.
The recent state budget also noted that household size has marginally decreased in recent years – possibly driven by the pandemic and the desire of people for more space. Queensland’s treasurer, Cameron Dick, said on Thursday this minor change to the typical household had created the need for about 60,000 new homes.
The committee said the state’s 2017 to 2027 housing strategy “has been, and continues to be, delivered through multiple action plans to deliver social housing, support vulnerable people and foster a fair and accessible housing system”.
