2025-02-21
In an astonishing display of avoidance, the Premier panicked when asked a simple question from the Greens during Question Time yesterday.
The Victorian Greens spokesperson for Public and Affordable Housing, Gabrielle de Vietri asked if the state had plans to build a single genuinely public home at the sites where the towers are going to be demolished.
Ms de Vietri made it explicitly clear that her question referred to public housing, not social housing.
Despite the clear distinction, the Premier’s initial response referred to social housing anyway, and when pulled up on a point of relevance to address public housing specifically, the Premier refused to get up again and finish her answer.
Ms de Vietri says that the performance the Premier gave just to avoid her question is extremely telling that her government clearly doesn’t have any plans to build more public housing at the tower sites, despite the plan wiping out a total of 7000 public homes.
It comes the same week after the Housing Minister Harriet Shing also explicitly avoided answering the question about public housing in an article in The Age that exposed that ministers within Labor’s own ranks think the plan to demolish the towers has ‘no justification’.
Victoria has the least amount of public housing and spends the least on public housing out of any state in the country.
Despite a ballooning public housing waitlist, the Victorian Labor Government is planning to demolish 7000 public homes across the 44 public housing towers.
To date, the Victorian Labor Government hasn’t committed to a single public home being rebuilt at the tower sites.
Quotes attributable to Victorian Greens Renters’ Rights spokesperson, Gabrielle de Vietri:
“We’ve seen Labor continuously dance around this question, and yesterday the Premier just flat out refused to answer it. What that tells me is that they have absolutely no plan to build a single public home at the tower sites.
“We’re in the middle of a housing crisis where the public housing waitlist is ballooning out of control. We should be building more public housing, not less, but this Labor government is selling off public land and knocking down the public housing we already have, it makes no sense.
“There’s absolutely no evidence to back up the demolition of the towers and Labor knows it. It’s no surprise that the Premier can’t answer simple questions when the wheels are clearly falling off this disastrous plan.”