2017 VPTA Annual General Meeting
The 2017 AGM will be held at 2pm on Tuesday 5th September at the VPTA office in the Community Facility at 11 High Street, Northcote (Stop 26 on the No. 86 Tram).
All public housing tenants are welcome at our AGM. Please confirm your attendance prior to the event so we can ensure sufficient seating and refreshments are available. You can Register to attend by clicking on the link on our VPTA website home page: https://vpta.org.au/ or call our office on Freecall 1800 015 510.
The meeting will include presentation of the Annual Report and audited 2016–2017 Financial Statement. Announcement of membership of the 2017-2019 VPTA Board will be made at the closure of the meeting.
Several staff and Board members will be present to assist with any of your public-housing related inquiries. After the AGM we will provide some round-table workshops for tenants to raise State-wide public housing issues, to report individual problems for VPTA follow-up or to discuss Departmental policy matters.
A light afternoon tea will also be provided for attendees after proceedings have finished. For catering purposes, we need people to let us know they will be attending!
The VPTA has to move!
The Walker Street Northcote estate (where we have had our office since 2003) is one of a number of ‘Walk-Up’ estates in Melbourne that is to be demolished in order for new public housing to be constructed.
We agree with the State Government that these walk-ups have outlived their suitability for public housing and are beyond ‘patching up’. They are outdated, have too many stairs and no lifts and cost a fortune to maintain at a standard that, in some cases, is barely habitable. The solution is to demolish them and build new housing!
The Department is working on our behalf to find suitable premises for the VPTA to move to. Our new premises will also be close to public transport and provide the space we need for staff to get their job done in a safe and suitable environment.
This year’s AGM may well be the last general VPTA public housing tenants’ meeting we hold at the Walker Street offices, so come along and say ‘good-bye’ to our ‘home’ of many years!
Estate Redevelopments
The State Government has announced a number of Public Housing ‘walk-up’ estates are to be redeveloped and the Department is facilitating tenant consultation at these sites. These redevelopments will likely include some private housing development as a means of funding the new public housing dwellings.
The VPTA recognises that the decision to allow private housing on public housing land is a controversial one. Some people are opposed to the redevelopments because they believe all of the housing delivered should remain as public housing and that this exercise is a sellout of public housing to the private sector.
However, on a practical level, we all know that if we wait for governments to invest billions of dollars to rebuild our crumbling public housing, we will be waiting forever. The last three decades of sustained and dispiriting neglect of public housing has taught us that!