Ms JENNY AITCHISON (Maitland—Minister for Regional Transport and Roads) (19:59): In February there were at least 391 people who were homeless in Maitland. There were also about 4,100 people who were couch-surfing and over 5,000 people in supported homelessness accommodation. That is a staggering increase in numbers. Then earlier this year the former Government released its figures for the priority housing list. To put this in perspective, in February 2021, when the former Government released those figures, there were 30 applications on that priority homelessness list. Those were people subjected to domestic violence or with mental illness, drug addiction, disabilities, severe complex comorbidities and health problems. There were 30 applications for people and their families. Two years later, just before the election, we finally got the figure out of the former Government. It had risen to 101 applications on the list, just in Maitland. In two short years it had more than tripled.

I have seen the evidence of this in my electorate office. When I first got elected, eight years ago, probably about 45 per cent of my case load of constituents was people at risk of homelessness or having problems with social housing. It was a lot. Now around 80 per cent of people are coming with complaints around housing. When I first started, the vast majority of those people who were coming to me with issues of housing were from groups that are seen as more vulnerable in our community because they might have been discriminated against, had mental health or drug and alcohol issues, or experienced domestic violence.

There was always a reason. It was not a good reason, and it did not mean they deserved to be homeless, but you could see that there had been a pathway to where they had got to. However, in the past 12 to 18 months, people have been coming in to my electorate office—people with two kids, a dog and two incomes, who have worked all their lives and been stable tenants for 10 years—who are facing homelessness or are actually homeless. Some have their boys in a tent out the back of a relative's house and the girls on a couch in someone else's house. It is splitting up families.

That is why I was so pleased to see such a large contingent of people from all over the homelessness and broader community sector come together this past week to hold the inaugural Maitland Homelessness Summit. I pay tribute to all the organisations that contributed to this. I made a small contribution myself, but Hume Community Housing Association, Carrie's Place Domestic Violence and Homelessness Services, the Samaritans, Homelessness NSW, First National Real Estate Maitland, TAFE New South Wales and Maitland City Council came together to look at how we can address this problem in our community.

I pay special tribute to the people who work in that sector. Maslow's hierarchy of needs says that shelter is the number one need that humans have. For the workers in this sector to get up every single day with an impossible wicked problem they cannot fix for people in my office or in the broader community is just too much. I am seeing that in the fact that they are so stressed out. I have seen it in my electorate staff. People are faced with this wall they cannot get through. I give special thanks to Ali Haggarty from First National, who is a real estate agent. I remember going to her a couple of years ago and saying, "I've had someone come to my office. They've applied for 120 houses, and they still can't get a rental." She said, "That's the new normal, Jenny. That's, unfortunately, the problem we have in our community." And it is just getting worse. She is trying to get people into houses, but the current rental vacancy rate in Maitland is 0.1 or 0.2 per cent. This should not be our new normal. It is not acceptable.

I am so pleased to be part of a government that is doing something about this. One of the first pieces of legislation that came into this House was around better rental laws. That is something the Government has been working on. I acknowledge the presence in the Chamber of the Minister for Planning and Public Spaces—I know he is working on that, as is the Minister for Housing and the Minister for Homelessness, Rose Jackson, in the other place. And of course the Premier has a strong personal commitment. It is really sad that last week the Minister in the other place had to announce the sudden freeze in the selling-off of government housing. Why should we on this side have had to announce that? It is a great announcement. The problem is that we should not have had to make it. The people on the other side of this Chamber sold off $3.5 billion worth of public housing over the past 12 years, and the figures we have show that there are 300 fewer properties in New South Wales than there were 12 years ago. It is a disgrace and a shame.