David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week we learnt, thanks to some profound investigative work by the Guardian, that homeless Australians are dying on our streets at an average age of 44 years old, younger than most of the people in this place and little more than half the life span of the average Australian. This is a disgrace in a country like Australia, but it's also a by-product of how we've come to treat housing as a country: less as a fundamental human right, as something that everyone in our community should be able to afford, and more as a wealth creation vehicle. We have a system where it's arguably easier to buy your second house than your first one. But we can't keep ignoring the 122,000-plus Australians who are homeless, the 640,000 Australians who are on the waitlist for social housing or the one million Australians who now access a food bank each month. We're an incredibly wealthy country, and we're about to enjoy a second federal budget surplus. Now is the time to redouble our efforts.

Today CHIA was out on the radio, again, calling for a doubling of the Housing Australia Future Fund. This is something that I've been pushing for the last couple of years. It makes sense to use this vehicle to build more social and affordable housing. We've seen today the debate on tax. My hope is that this is the start of this debate and that we will have the courage to tackle things like the capital gains tax discount on investment properties and negative gearing to turn this ship around, to make housing more affordable for people in our communities and to say to people who have multiple investment properties that this needs to change.