2. Newspaper Article - Minister for Housing Office corrects Jean Madden's statistics
INCORRECT STATISTICS
Excerpt from Jean Madden newspaper interview:
"On July 31 this year there were 10,500 families in Queensland on the emergency accommodation waiting list", she said.
"But by September that figure had jumped to 30,000 families, that is in Queensland alone."Ms Madden said she had recently spoken with Queensland's housing minister Bruce Flegg questioning the sale of public housing and caravan parks used for emergency housing. "The Minister for Housing actually said to me that by the end of November, he would have sold off pretty much all of the social housing houses."
"So there will pretty much be zero availability by then."
Jean Madden said those 30,000 homeless families, represented around 90,000 homeless people.
"So if you work that out on a per capita basis - going on a population basis - that is just over two per cent.
"In the US, they're around one per cent."
THE TRUTH
Excerpt from Jean Madden newspaper interview - Ministers Office refutes Jean Madden.
However a spokesman for Housing Minister Bruce Flegg said the number of people seeking public housing on the housing register had dropped from "around 30,000 families" - representing around 70,000 people - to around 27,500 families.
The spokesman disagreed and suggested two different categories of people were being discussed. He said the latest statistics showed about 10,500 Queenslanders were technically homeless.
"What Bruce has also said is that of those 30,000 families, around 10,000 of them are "technically homeless", the spokesman said.
"In that they don't have any right to the place where they sleep, no lease; they might be couch-surfing, they might be sleeping under a bridge, in the back of a car."
"These are the two figures I can confirm."