On Thursday, 31 July I asked the Director General of the Department of Housing and Public Works about the three strike policy for social housing eligibility and evictions from crisis accommodation.
You can read my question and the Director General's response below or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
Mr BERKMAN: I wanted to put a question to the director-general just to clarify the options for Queenslanders seeking housing support under the new government. There was some discussion before about the LNP’s new public housing antisocial behaviour policy whereby a social housing tenant who records three instances of antisocial behaviour could be evicted. If their behaviour is dangerous or illegal then they and the whole household could be evicted and banned for two years.
Director-General, I think you said before that, where someone is ineligible for both the Immediate Housing Response—so emergency accommodation—and social housing, there are still other products available to them. Can you please clarify for us how many people in Queensland are currently banned from both social housing and the IHR because of antisocial behaviour and those policies together, and can you please advise a list of other products that you said are available to them?
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: There are two parts there. Director-General, if you are able to answer that, it would be appreciated—one at a time.
Mr Cridland: I might ask for a repeat of some parts of the question at some point, member, but I will do my best to answer your question. It is important to set the context around the level of accommodation we are providing through the Immediate Housing Response through our partners at the specialist homelessness services and also through our refuge accommodation assistance that is being run by our department. Taking the first one, IHR: we provided over 471,000 nights of accommodation in 2024-25. For our refuge accommodation assistance, we provided a further 293,000 nights of accommodation. From recollection, that assisted over 9,000 people throughout the year with emergency accommodation.
I will move to other products. If they are deemed by our specialist homelessness services to be ineligible under IHR for a variety of reasons that are in the policy guidelines, there are other services like accredited residential services, crisis accommodation, private rental support, other temporary supported accommodations and full supportive housing options. The sector’s desire is to make sure that anyone who is deemed ineligible for this one product for various reasons, be it their behaviour, they are supported by other options.
That is important because we use about 401 motels and hotels across the state. They are all privately owned. Where people misbehave and cause damage—as the minister alluded to, there was nearly $600,000 worth of damage caused to those motels—they jeopardise the entire system for everyone who is in them. At the moment we have just under 4,000 people in those hotels and motels, and we need to keep access to those to provide that assistance.
Mr BERKMAN: I appreciate the importance of that emergency accommodation with one in my electorate. The element of the question that has not been answered is: can you tell us how many people are currently banned from both social housing and the emergency accommodation options because of antisocial behaviour and the IHR policies taken together?
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Director-General, do you have that detail?
Mr Cridland: I have a part of it. I might have to look into the social housing options for you. In terms of the IHR, the advice I have from our specialist homelessness services is that they reported having to exit 96 households. Of those, 59 per cent was due to aggressive or abusive behaviour, harassment towards residents or breach of hotel-motel regulations.
Mr BERKMAN: Just to be clear, that is the IHR component alone. Are you coming back to us on how many people have been deemed ineligible for social housing under the three-strikes policy?
Mr Cridland: My team has beat me to it. There have been no evictions under the antisocial behaviour policy to date. In the last financial year, there were 45 evictions in total for behaviour under the fair expectations of behaviour, the preceding policy.
Mr BERKMAN: Do you have any assessment of the overlap of people who in the last financial year are now ineligible for both social housing and IHR emergency support?
Mr Cridland: The new IHR policy commenced on 30 May, so there has been no overlap as yet, with reference to the answer that no-one has exited social housing.