Victorian worker makes plea to housing inquiry while living in tent

Australia Broadcast Center

09-05-2025

Anthony Rowse loves the feeling of working with his hands.
The 25-year-old spends his days making skip bins for trailers and harvesting equipment near Ballarat in Victoria's west.
But that sense of achievement can quickly evaporate when he goes back to Lake Burumbeet and prepares for a cold night in his tent.
"The other night I caught a rat making its way into the tent," Mr Rowse said.
Mr Rowse said his best mate, Ghost, a three-year-old husky-ridgeback cross, was his only companion.
"I caught it [the rat] but Ghost wanted to play with it and she let it go," he said.
Mr Rowse spent most of his adult life living in his family home in Ballarat, an hour and a half north-west of Melbourne.
But he faced housing instability for the first time after the death of his mother and the end of a long-term relationship.
Mr Rowse took advice from a coworker and began camping at the lake.
He has been there on and off for the past couple of years, despite efforts to secure more permanent housing.
"I'm just getting knocked back and back," he said.
"They say I've got no rental history. And it's expensive.
"I'd love a house."
Long-term camping grounds are becoming a place to call "home" for an increasing number of the homeless.
One homelessness worker told the ABC he had seen a "200 per cent increase" in temporary residents at camping spots across the state.
A state government parliamentary inquiry is underway across regional Victoria seeking input on ways to address the country's housing and homelessness crisis.
Members have asked where the most urgent need for housing is, the workforce challenges in constructing homes and the need for accommodation for regional workers in key sectors.
Damian Stock, chief executive of ARC Justice, a service that provides legal help and tenancy advocacy support to people in Central and Northern Victoria, told the inquiry the gap between rental prices and income had increased significantly in regional Victoria.
"It's the worst it's ever been," Mr Stock told the inquiry during a hearing in Ballarat.
He discussed the need for tax incentives for investors who provided long-term rentals and investment in crisis, transitional and social housing.
"There's a real role for the government to directly invest in public housing … it's been a decline over the past three decades of any investments directly into public housing."
The state government released an ambitious target in 2024 to create 2.2 million new homes by 2051, 47,000 of which would be in Ballarat.
Committee member Martha Haylett, the Labor MP for Ripon, said developers were concerned about meeting those targets.
"There's worry that our Victorian government targets about how much we need to build in our more populated areas, like central Ballarat, versus out in paddocks where there is nothing," Ms Haylett said.
In 2020, western Victorian company AME Systems bought a hotel in Ararat in a last-ditch effort to fill a chronic labour and housing shortage.
The company is still struggling to find worker accommodation.
Bauenort Management director, Anton Pound, has developed large-scale sites in Ballarat over the past decade.
He told the inquiry he had built about 90 per cent of homes on greenfield sites, including the established areas of Ballarat.
Mr Pound told the inquiry the government's target to boost Ballarat's infill developments to 60 per cent was not achievable.
Mr Pound said he supported a transition, but it needed to be slow.
"It's too big a step," he said.
"In the meantime we just need to find a way to house these people."
Ada Watson is an outreach worker who checks in with Anthony Rowse on a weekly basis, providing him with vouchers, food and support.
She said something needed to be done.
"I'd love to see a huge stockpile of achievable and affordable housing without it being so hard for people to get a home," Ms Watson said.
She said she had seen a rise in the number of families sleeping rough.
If there's no houses for them to move into, we just have to come out and give food to make life a little easier for them."
Mr Rowse said there needed to be more homes available for those sleeping rough.
"You've got a warm home, safe at night, no animals coming in, you've got a place where you actually belong, a place that feels like home," he said.