HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018

HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018 Document dated 25 December 2018

When we bought our house in Preston, in Melbourne, Victoria, the type of house was called a villa unit in 2000, and we moved in in January and February 2001 from Sydney and Newcastle.

We are unit 2 of two units and unit 1 is the front one, nearest the street along the driveway which is common property.

It didn’t take us long to discover that unit 1 was public housing, in other words it belonged to the Victorian Department of Housing. It was not administered by them and was managed by an organisation called “North East Housing. It was controlled under a scheme called “Transitional Housing” and was supposed to mean that tenants were placed there until more suitable accommodation could be found for them, supposedly for about 1 year from placement.

We soon discovered that this did not mean what it said and some tenants were there much longer, which was both good and bad.

For the purpose of this document, the current tenants fall under the word “bad”, not only bad, but shocking!

We estimate that the current tenant is the 13^th since we moved in on 27 January 2001, and to date have been in unit 1 for 2 years and two months.

In that time she has been appallingly rude to us using the worst of language and threatening us in several ways, to the extent that we have spoken to the police because Haven, Home Safe have not responded to our requests that this family be moved out as soon as possible.

We suspected that her problem may be homophobia and we felt she was linking that to paedophilia because she has 3 little boys, one now aged about 3 and the other two seem to be about 7 years old.

It all came to a head on the afternoon of 15 December 2018 as the following details will explain:

We have complained about the driveway being cluttered with the children’s toys – bicycles, scooters, large netball balls and other paraphernalia. We have not complained about the children playing with them, our complaint is that when the children are not playing with them, they are left lying in the driveway and being an obstruction to those of us who use the driveway every day.

On this day at 1.30pm two friends came to pick us up to go shopping. One of these friends is a man in his late 80s and he uses a walker aid and walks with difficulty. He is also legally blind as he has Macular Degeneration, and therefore has to be helped with his walking wherever he goes. The driveway was cluttered as usual and the other friend, who is not incapacitated kicked one of the items out of the way to help the person with the walker make his way through along the driveway to unit 2, our unit.

We got ready to go shopping and were walking down the driveway to the street when the tenant came to one of the windows of unit 1 and screeched at one of our friends, “GO FUCK YOURSELVES YOU POOFTERS!”.

There was other abuse as well, such as “Haven laughs at you, they think you are a joke” (judging by the responses we have had from Housing, this seems to be true!!!), but we have reached the stage where this behaviour can not be tolerated any longer.

If the tenant is not removed in the very near future, we will be considering an intervention order on advice from the police. We will also be considering retaining a lawyer to bring a damages claim against both the Housing Minister and HHS for the stress, inconvenience and cost caused by the tenants despite repeated requests for their removal, over a lengthy period of time.