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 13th 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.
