As it happened: WA news on Monday, February 17

Pearce MP Tracey Roberts will recontest the upcoming federal election despite being diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s disease.

Roberts took to Facebook today to detail her fight which she had been battling behind closed doors.

“Recently, I had some unfortunate health news. I have been diagnosed with multiple systems atrophy, which will pose some changes to my mobility and speech,” she said.

“I was shocked to receive this news and a little scared, as it’s rare, and I hadn’t heard of it before.

WA Police have just released footage of a man, who allegedly took off his electronic monitoring device, being found hiding in a cupboard.

The two-week long manhunt for Phillip Dodd, 36, came to an end this morning.

It’s alleged he was granted bail for serious family violence charges on January 23 and was subject to wearing a tracking device.

However on January 29, Dodd allegedly breached his electronic monitoring device conditions, and was found by police a short time later and hauled back before a magistrate who again released him on bail.

Decades of falling productivity in housing construction has restricted the supply of new homes and contributed to increasingly unaffordable housing, research from the Productivity Commission has revealed.

The damning assessment of the residential construction sector found that over the past 30 years, physical productivity has declined by 53 per cent and labour productivity by 12 per cent. In contrast, labour productivity in the broader economy has increased by 49 per cent over the same period.

It comes on top of construction costs increasing by 40 per cent in the past five years while residential build times are up 80 per cent over the last 15 years.

Commission chair Danielle Wood said governments were rightly focused on changing planning rules to boost the supply of new homes, but the speed and cost of new builds also mattered.

Sticking with Premier Roger Cook and Housing Minister John Carey’s press conference in Perth this morning, and Carey has partially blamed WA’s most infamous public servant for public housing stock going backwards for several years under Labor.

The total public housing stock dropped by nearly 2000 properties in the five years after Labor came to power in 2017, from 44,087 to 42,661.

It has since crept back to 44,591 as of September last year, but the issue has been a sore point for the government as the state grapples with a housing crisis.

In announcing a suite of new housing election promises, Carey defended the slow growth in social housing numbers – blaming the now-jailed former Housing Authority general manager Paul Whyte.

To some education news now and West Australian schools relying on a free lunch program to help students and their families through the cost of living crisis has reported an increase in the number accessing the service.

Eat Up said 77 per cent of state schools using their program had recorded an increase in the number of students accessing it compared to the same time last year.

Now, around 20 per cent of students at each school are regularly relying on the free lunches. In the past financial year, Eat Up delivered a record-breaking 948,583 free school lunches to 912 schools nationwide – a 47 per cent increase in just 12 months.

Eat Up founder Lyndon Galea said the demand for services was exploding, with no signs of slowing down.