‘Basically, I get less than $2 million for my electorate for social housing,’ Greens Member for Ballina Tamara Smith said in response to this week’s state budget announcement.
‘We don’t actually know where that social housing money will be invested in the regions but a simple maths of about 60 regional seats works out to be less than two million per seat,’ Ms Smith said.
The member for Ballina was unimpressed with the government’s social housing investment in Labor’s first NSW budget in more than ten years, contrasting it with the recent Labor budget in Victoria.
‘In their budget this year, five point something billion,’ Ms Smith said of the Victorian Labor government, ‘and the NSW Labour government, that’s less than 100 million’.
This week’s budget showed 30% of a $300 million investment in state-owned house building agency Landcom dedicated to affordable housing.
‘I don’t think they’re taking it seriously, said Ms Smith, ‘it’s a drop in the ocean of what the actual need is’.
Ballina MP calls for 100 new social housing dwellings
The Ballina MP said there were fifty social housing units delivered in the Tweet electorate two years ago ‘without any fuss’.
‘I keep saying to the premier, give me a hundred,’ she said, ‘give me fifty in Ballina Shire and fifty in Byron Shire.’
‘Let’s greenlight this and really make a difference.’
Other references to social housing in the budget came under a $224 million Essential Housing Package.
Funds for debt financing, including for social housing, amounted to more than $70 million.
The government allocated more than $35 million for critical maintenance of social housing.
There were also significantly lesser amounts allocated to mental health housing ($20 million), urgent priority housing and homelessness ($15 million) and temporary accommodation ($11 million).
But the Greens MP said frontline charities in her electorate were missing out.
Community-led frontline charities missing in budget, says Ballina MP
The Greens recently joined a campaign for the government to fund services at the Byron Bay community-led charity Fletcher Street Cottage but Ms Smith said the call appeared to have been ignored in the budget.
The cottage provides a range of wrap-around services for people sleeping rough and / or at risk owing to local housing pressures but Byron Community Centre General Manager Louise O’Connell says it costs a million dollars each year to run.
‘The issue that we have at the moment is some key social organisations like the Fletcher Street [Cottage,] like Mullumbimby [District] Neighborhood Centre, like Wardell CORE, and others, cannot get any funding for wages for salaries for their operational costs,’ Ms Smith said.
‘Labor went to this election saying that they will absolutely deliver recurrent funding for organisations like that,’ Ms Smith said.
‘Fletcher Street Cottage is doing the work that government should do,’ she said, ‘we absolutely think that Government needs to be funding that program, as well as a number of other significant programs that are delivering social supports and still doing post-flood social supports.’
‘We know that Byron Shire has some of the highest rates of rough sleeping in the country, so there could not be more of a need.
‘But we’ve been given a very, I’d hate to say mean spirited, but it’s a budget that, really ,there’s not a lot in there for vulnerable communities.
‘There just really isn’t.’
Greens slam gov’t rent-to-buy scheme as ‘bonkers’
The NSW Labor government has recently spoken of a new rent-to-buy scheme, allowing renters to have their rent contribute towards the cost of buying their abodes.
But the Greens member for Ballina said the party was unimpressed with the detail.
‘What the proposal is, is to use Crown land, so 100% public land,’ Ms Smith said.
‘Seventy per cent is private,’ Ms Smith said, explaining sales of properties developers would be allowed to build on public land ‘for free’.
The remaining 30% would be used for social housing, Ms Smith said.
‘We think that it should be 100% social housing,’ she said, ‘and the government could eat easily give those developers an incentive’.
‘At the end of the day, we’re handing over to private corporations 70%,’ she said, ‘obviously, they’ve built, but they’re getting that land for free’.
‘To me that is just bonkers.’
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