Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, , 4:15:18 to 4:20:39
Officials discuss the impact of housing sales on families and elders in Mount Isa, detailing efforts to find alternative accommodation and the complications arising from social housing eligibility and organizational liquidation.
Topics: First Nations, Social services
Speakers: Julie-Ann Guivarra, Speaker 25, Senator Lidia Thorpe, Unknown Speaker, Senator Karen Grogan
like the houses are gone. property developer just sailed in and brought up 12 of them, made our people homeless. would you do things differently when you find out that our people in ainal need a million bucks to bail them out or ended up only being 6 or 700,000 in the That money could have saved 15 families to stay in ainal housing. Would you do Where where are those families? Are they
>> So, Senator, I'll actually let um the the group manager responsible for Eastston talk about sort of the circumstances a little bit in relation to the tenants, but you can appreciate um and there will be an opportunity obviously to speak to Oric tomorrow as well, but um there were some complications obviously associated with the organization itself. um uh and I think publicly ORIc has been clear that um there was an investigation that was undertaken from uh about July we became aware of it. Uh in addition to that of course um through this process now Oric has put in place special administrator and now a liquidator. Our priority throughout and I think we discussed this when we had uh briefed you as well some time back was looking at what could be done to support the tenants. As I said, we went through a range of different activities directly with the tenants where we organized pop-up um meetings uh and sessions with the tenants and also service providers in the community to see if there was alternatives that could be provided as well as Queensland government who have as I understand it now assisted several of those families. Um the complications with the tenants as well was that in fact not all of those those uh families were in fact eligible for social housing given sort of income >> levels of the families. But I will just um defer to our group managers to go through a little bit more in terms of what's happening with the tenants now because that was part of your question.
community actually had a self-determination self-determining model that they wanted to put in place, but that was also denied by NAR for that
community. So Senator as I said it's there are in part complications associated with the um the situation of the organization >> previous organization >> it still has been in existence until such time as the Oric has now put in a special administrator and a >> and a liquidator. So there were definitely issues associated with um the ability to uh deal with the directors of the organization at the time which in terms of then others stepping in to um exercise uh self-determination in an alternative to I mean those were things that we we had looked at you know we we had also met with um the Queensland housing aberiginal community controlled housing peak and others to look at whether there were options on that but I'll turn to um Miss Pattrick
>> Senator Selena Pattrick, group manager, Eastern Group. Um, I will go to the tenants, but just to add to what our CEO was saying, um, the ownership of the property rested with the organization. Uh, and so we weren't able to enact the would prevent the sale. So uh essentially a newly established body would have still needed to work with the existing body that was uh not to the to the other organization to the new organization. So that was the difficulty was because there was no um operational board uh there was no one for a new organization to engage with and we couldn't stop the sale through the council because their legislation did override ours. Um just in regards to the tenants um we acknowledge that tenants are still working through um their arrangements but we have been advised um and I sort of I want to say less than five because I don't want to give away personal information um but there has been a number of tenants who have found alternative accommodation are in the process of moving. Uh we also understand that there's another three tenants that are working through um getting properties at the moment.
>> Thank you. Um
>> Senator Thorpe, if you're going to change topic, I'm going to um rotate the call and then we'll come back.