2021-01-18
In a wealthy place like Perth, everyone should have a roof over their head and access to a strong social safety net.
Yet more than 9,000 Western Australians are homeless each night and nearly 25,000 people are on WA’s public housing waitlist.
A tent city popped up in recent weeks in central Fremantle, demonstrating the very human face of the housing crisis many Western Australians have been facing for a long time. Of course, it is not Perth’s first. There have been well-publicised tent cities in Rockingham and East Perth and new ones have emerged in Joondalup and Melville.
The McGowan Government has shut down more public housing than they have built, with the average wait time for social housing in the Perth metro area at almost 2 years. Despite this public housing shortage, the McGowan Government has only committed to building a mere 260 new dwellings a year for the next 10 years.
The State Government’s housing strategy should not rely on the good will of local residents to look after our communities like we’ve seen at Fremantle’s tent city. I commend the volunteers who have been working tirelessly to look after Fremantle’s most vulnerable, but it is far past time for the McGowan Government to take responsibility for WA’s worsening homelessness crisis.
I am calling on the State Government to work with service providers to get every person at the Fremantle tent city into permanent accommodation.
We need to elect more Green voices to WA Parliament to ensure everyone has access to affordable housing. If I’m elected to WA Parliament in March, I will fight alongside our Greens MPs to end WA’s homelessness crisis by:
- Building 15,000 new low-carbon social housing units over 3 years
- Mandating 20% affordable & 10% social housing in new developments
- Implementing a genuine co-design approach to design & build culturally appropriate social housing for First Nations People
Please join Alison Xamon MLC, Dorinda Cox lead Senate candidate, two lived experience advocates and myself on Thursday 21 January for a discussion about WA’s homelessness crisis.