A southern New South Wales MP says community assets like those in Griffith ought to be renewed to meet housing demand, or if sold, the proceeds reinvested for the same purpose in the same community.
Shooters Fishers and Farmers MP for Murray Helen Dalton told Flow she hosted a housing and homelessness forum in Griffith on Wednesday in the electorate recently and believed local assets could have been reinvigorated to meet housing demand:
"We've got families sleeping in cars, farm workers hotbedding - two sharing a bed, one at day, one at night - that's how dire the situation is because we don't have enough accommodation.
"We can't keep wasting public buildings. We have many that are empty. The government just neglects them and leaves them to rot, building like the old nurses' quarters they ended up demolishing, the old Griffith ambulance station, the Yenda police residence ... the government just lets them deteriorate then says it's too hard to get them in order, and they just knock them down.
"We need an audit of unused public buildings in Griffith to determine if they can be repurposed or reused and, if they are sold off, the money must be reinvested in housing within our community - rather than take the money back to Macquarie Street."
Hear the full interview with Helen Dalton MP covering the public nurse protests on Thursday and her intentions for state or federal politics in future on the FlowNews24 podcast below: