Australia’s two largest cities have gained the attention of the Queensland Parliament’s Community Support and Services Committee for potentially holding the keys to the state’s worsening housing shortage.

The committee toured the two southern capitals in June, before tabling the report on their findings this month.

Committee chair and Labor’s Member for Mansfield, Corinne McMillan, said the tour was arranged “to investigate innovative models for the provision of social housing” to primarily address homelessness and the pressures on hard-hit sectors of the community finding secure accommodation, particularly women and First Nations people.

“Sydney and Melbourne are more multicultural, more complex and more densely populated, but nonetheless the challenges facing these two cities are also those experienced in Brisbane, South East Queensland and regional Queensland,” McMillan said.

Joining McMillan on the tour were her Labor colleagues Cynthia Lui and Robert Skelton from the Cook and Nicklin electorates, LNP members Stephen Bennett and Dr Mark Robinson, from Burnett and Oodgeroo and Greens MP Michael Berkman from Maiwar, in Brisbane’s inner west.

Berkman, whose party has been running hard on more support for renters, including proposing a rental freeze, used the tabling of the report to again probe the government’s role in exacerbating the crisis rather than alleviating pressure in the sector.

In a letter of “reservation” included in the report, Berkman said NSW, Victoria and Queensland shared a “chronic underinvestment in social housing” but that the “Queensland Government appears to have taken this one step further”.

“In recent years the government has narrowed the Social Housing Eligibility Criteria (SHEC), with the effect of excluding countless people from the social housing register – people who need housing support and would previously have been eligible – effectively masking how many people are being let down by the government’s failing social housing policy,” Berkman wrote.

“Further, I believe there has been a concerted effort to obfuscate these changes, to the point of repeatedly misleading parliament when asked about this issue in both the last parliament and the current term.”

Berkman said he had repeatedly asked Housing Minister Leeanne Enoch about the changes to the SHEC, only to be told that ‘social housing eligibility criteria has not changed since 2018’.

He said recent budget estimates hearings revealed that the SHEC had changed around October 2019.

“But even this answer from the department continued to obfuscate and downplay the significance of the changes, describing very clear and consequential changes as being ‘further clarification’, a ‘reframing’ of some criteria, or making certain elements of the SHEC ‘visible and transparent’,” he said.

“Key stakeholders in the community housing sector have been telling us about the consequences of these changes since 2019, and the data paints a clear picture of exactly when and how the changes to the SHEC have excluded people from the social housing register who would have previously been eligible.”

Berkman said data from the social housing register, compiled and plotted by the Parliamentary Library, showed that from November 2019 – immediately following the changes to the SHEC – no new applicants were accepted onto the social housing register other than “very high need” applicants.

He said that before November 2019, hundreds of “high”, “moderate”, and “lower” need applicants were deemed eligible for social housing and added to the social housing register every single month.

“We can only guess at how many people have been excluded from the social housing register since November 2019 but, given the number of successful applicants before the changes to the SHEC, the number would be in the thousands. And the housing crisis has only worsened since then,” he wrote.

“No matter how hard the Government tries to hide the problem, the number of people waiting for social housing has continued to grow.

“The Queensland Government is completely failing to meet this most fundamental need for some of the most disadvantaged people in the state, and no amount of spin or misinformation will change that.

“No matter how poorly Governments in NSW and Victoria are performing at housing their residents, in a wealthy state like Queensland we deserve better.”

In defending the government’s record, McMillan said in the report that the Queensland Government has commenced construction of 4897 new social homes since 2015, and completed 3950 social homes as at August 25 this year, in recognition of the “trajectory of demand”.

“Housing supply pressures experienced nationally since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic were compounded in Queensland with unprecedented population migration, limited land availability, record low rental vacancies, rising house prices, building supply issues, inflation, labour shortages, and rising fuel prices driven by the war in Ukraine,” she said.

“In 2021-22, the Queensland Government commenced 832 new social homes across Queensland and completed 410 new social homes in the same period – exceeding the first-year target of the Housing and Homelessness Action Plan 2021-2025 of 727 social housing commencements by 30 June 2022.

“The Queensland Government also provided almost 200,000 forms of housing assistance, including emergency housing, social housing, private market assistance (such as rental grants and bond loans) and homelessness services – to ease the pressure being felt in the system right now.”