Our state MP goes into bat for our Housing issue

Must say I nearly bloody fainted when a snail mail letter came from our NSW state Labor member of parliament Micheal Daley, representative for Maroubra. First here is the email I sent to him:

Hi Michael, 

Please find attached a denial letter by the Dept of Housing for my partner and I to go on the priority housing list. I feel the rules are ridiculous surrounding what is deemed "affordable" rent. Isn't there some kind of review going on with NSW housing at the moment? 

David and I have been under extreme rental stress since the middle of last year. I get a partnered DSP pension of $760 a fortnight. David got discriminated at his last work last year and hasn't been able to work for a period of time. David gets Newstart and the Carers Allowance for me, about $600 a fortnight. Bringing our total income to $1360 a fortnight, or $665 a week. Our rent is $380 here where we are. They deemed our rent affordability at $360 a week, just $20 under what we're presently paying anyway. 

We applied through ACON housing this mega form to get on the priority housing list. We passed every criteria that you needed to get on the list, except for housing saying that we could move somewhere that had rent a bit cheaper than here under what they deemed as affordable for us, that being $360 a week. And so all they did was look up places on the internet that were less than $360 a week and said there was no reason why we couldn't apply for those, and rejected our whole application for priority housing on those grounds. After all the work it took putting together the Housing form, rejected over something silly like that. 

So my question is, how on earth can the dept of Housing, of all people, claim that $360 a week rent is affordable for a couple getting only $665 between them? After rent that leaves us with about $150 a week each for everything; food, clothing, meds, utilities, transport, everything. It's just not possible. $360 a week works out to about 55% of our income paid in rent. How can housing say this is affordable? Who made up these ridiculous affordability rules? I bet whoever did hasn't tried to get by on $150 a week. 

David and I are both HIV+. I also have other health issues (kidney failure after allergic reaction to HIV drugs) hence I'm on the DSP, easily qualifying under the new Labor introduced rules. Word is now about 75% of all DSP claims are rejected under those new rules. David is currently going through CRS at Centrelink to try and get back into nursing despite the depression. He also suffered a serious assault on new years by my psycho nephew from New Zealand who I'd never met before, in our own home. As a result he has been granted a victims comp thing from the dept of justice, the amount to be decided by a magistrate. It was extremely distressing for both of us, me witnessing the whole event. 

But that doesn't help us now, the credit card is nearly maxed out again at nearly $30,000. Although if not for that card we'd have been homeless by now. I've also gotten $10,000 ($7,800 after tax) out of my super under severe financial hardship clauses, and my sister gave us $10,000 to stay afloat. David has just gotten to 6 months on Newstart and we've just put in to get $10,000 ($7,800 after tax) to remain $afloat out of his super. It's going to be tight as we're now down to our last few $hundred again, might even have to delay the rent one week if the money doesn't get here in time. This is on $380 a week rent. 

Again, how can housing say that $360 a week is affordable for us? Even $320 as one of the places they found was advertised at. The whole lot is unaffordable. We need to be on that priority housing list. This is completely unfair.

And this is the relevant part of the letter in response to that email:

Honestly, we're both on our fuckin ass here. We've both got HIV on top of everything. How the fuck can we be denied access to the priority housing list over some stupid technicality. Namely some bullshit figures some bureaucratic fuckwit made up without ever experiencing the consequence of those bullshit figures. If anyone deserves to be helped out by Housing it's us.

We shall see where this goes, although I'm not exactly holding my breath.