Page 241 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 30 May 1989
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fortunate we are to have them. Few areas also bring more difficulties. As newly elected members of parliament we are coming to grips with that.
I guess that other members, like me, are receiving no small number of approaches from our electorate concerning housing. It is the most important thing in people's lives that they have somewhere to live, preferably somewhere satisfactory.
However, I want to take my time today to refer to one area specifically of the housing problem, and that is the area of youth homelessness. Within that context I want to emphasise in particular the community attitude to youth homelessness. I believe it is a major problem in the Canberra community, as it is in the rest of Australia. I do not believe that everybody else in Canberra, or in Australia, thinks that way. I think there is a fairly large general opinion that there is no problem there or, if it admits to a problem, it is that it is not the community's problem, that it is the parents' problem. I want to state as forcibly as I can that that is not right; there is a problem and it is our problem. It is one to which we have to attend.
I was delighted to hear the Minister for Housing and Urban Services say that she will release that report on youth housing - whatever title it will have - that has been sitting around for just a little time, I expect because the people who prepared it have been waiting for a government to which it may be submitted.
There is an urgent need in this community for crisis accommodation for young people. Statistics are available. The real statistics are rather more difficult to come by, but let me give some. I have information that in 1987-88 we provided accommodation in our various homes for some 500 young people. The appalling aspect of that is that about 100 of those were under 15 years of age. It takes quite a deal, I should think, to drive people of that young age out of their homes into the streets and into emergency accommodation. The particular worry about this, of course, is that they have no income, nor do they have access to welfare. They are just out there. Suddenly a crisis has developed in their homes and there they are, looking for somewhere to go. I challenge anybody in this community to say that 100 people under 15 years of age on our streets in any one year is not a crisis and that they do not need immediate attention. The ACT Schools Authority reported in 1986 that 200 of its students in secondary schools and secondary colleges had crisis needs, emergency needs, at some stage in that year, that they were not living in their family homes. So it is just some measure of the problem.
We do not have clear statistics of the number of people who, it is claimed, live out there in the streets. Those sorts of statistics are much harder to come by, and all sorts of claims are made. I will make none, except that they are there and that we need to attend to them.
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