The main cause of hardship and poverty for many low-income families and beneficiaries is the exceptionally high price of rent, and the only cause of high rents is the shortage of houses to rent.
While this Government is to be admired for housing homeless families in motels, I believe this is the wrong way to solve the problem as the $1 million a day it spent on motels and hostels for emergency housing last year would be better spent on building state houses.
Instead of putting these families in motels, it would cost a lot less to temporarily house them in second-hand caravans, army huts and prefab rooms at camping grounds.
The Government can use the savings to help further ramp up the building of state houses, which would reduce rental prices considerably.
Graham Gibson
