Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of this bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 4) Bill 2021. I want to focus on just one aspect, and that is the provisions in schedule 3, which I've no doubt will play a modest but important role in tackling the issue of homelessness and housing affordability in this country.

As chair of this House's Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, I'm currently working with my colleagues on the final report of an inquiry which we have undertaken into the issue of homelessness in Australia. Adopted in February last year, our inquiry received more than 200 submissions and held five public hearings last year. We heard that, at the 2016 census, the ABS found 116,427 people were classified as being homeless, under that definition—an increase of more than 14,000 over five years. The increase among older women was as high as 31 per cent. In my view, it's clear that, in relation to older women, this is an underestimate. In 2014 a study by the General Social Survey found that 2½ million Australians have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. Specialist homelessness services agencies report that, in 2018-19, there were 290,300 clients who sought assistance.

Homelessness is affecting every community in this country, and, sadly, one of the most severely impacted groups identified by the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement is older Australians. This problem is not always visible in Australia, as so many of our homeless are couch-surfing or living in their cars, just to name a few situations. However, the consequences for hundreds of thousands of Australians are nonetheless very real. Those who are homeless have difficulty accessing the services that they need. They are at an increased risk of violence—including sexual violence—drug and alcohol use, mental and physical health problems and severe poverty.

I don't want to pre-empt the findings of the committee, because that would be entirely inappropriate at this time. The evidence that the committee has heard during its inquiry tells me that there is a shortage of affordable housing options, and we need to do something about that. We need more available homes to reduce the rate of homelessness in this country. This government is investing more than $6 billion a year in supporting Australians with housing affordability. This includes around $4.6 billion in Commonwealth Rent Assistance to help eligible Australians to pay their rent and another $1.6 billion through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement to states and territories. In the most recent budget, the government invested an additional $124.7 million for states and territories under this agreement, which will be available to use on capital works to bolster public housing stocks.

Finally, in the past six months we've seen the biggest stimulus to the construction of accommodation in a generation, with the advent of the government's $2.7 billion HomeBuilder program. This is the same HomeBuilder program that those members opposite, in particular the member for Rankin, said would never work. They shouted out from the opposition benches, 'HomeBuilder will never work!'

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