House debates

Wednesday, 28 September 2022

Matters of Public Importance

Housing

3:11 pm

Photo of Rebekha SharkieRebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter, which I believe is of great public importance—housing affordability in Australia—because I believe what has always been a great dream for generations of Australians has become a nightmare. Australia is now among the worst in the world for housing affordability. I think we're No. 2, behind Hong Kong. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth—all of those destinations—are within the top 20 least-affordable cities in the world.

This has happened in one generation. As a young woman at 24 years of age, I was able to build my own home. It is very rare for a 24-year-old to be able to do that today. Indeed, we've gone from a median house being about 2.4 times the average annual income back in 1980 to now being around 10 times the average income. That's happened, really, in one generation, and it's largely because of the policies that have happened in this place and in various state parliaments. This will have a huge effect for generations because we know that if home ownership decreases that as people get older their ability to live a life in their older years without poverty also diminishes significantly. And those who are lucky enough to own their own home right now are feeling immense pressure with the rapid increase in interest rates.

How did we get here? We have, for much of my time in this parliament, always looked at the demand side, and we've put through policies that really do increase demand without necessarily looking at supply. I also draw the attention of the House to an excellent report recently released by the Grattan Institute called The great Australian nightmare by Brendan Coates—it was released just a couple of weeks ago. There are other factors as well that have created the nightmare that we're in right now.

Post 2005, surges in migration led to dramatically significant increases in rents to the point that, the Grattan Institute says, it was increased by around nine per cent higher by 2018 than it would have been if we did not have that high level of migration from around 2005. Now, that could have been addressed if we had increased housing supply at the same time as bringing more people into our nation. I don't want to sound like a NIMBY here, but, if you're going to bring more people in, naturally you have to have the houses for them to live in; otherwise, you just create more and more pressure.

Right now in my electorate we have people who are living in tents. They are living in caravans. These stories are filling my inbox and I'm sure they're filling everyone's inboxes right now. Just today a woman contacted me. She's in Normanville. Her adult son is living in a caravan out the back of her house because he's on JobSeeker and he can't afford even to share a place and certainly can't afford to rent his own place.

We also need to look at NRAS. I've talked myself blue in this place about the National Rental Affordability Scheme. While I really do commend the government on their plan to build an extra 30,000 social and affordable housing properties with the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, my concern is that there are currently 24,000 properties in the NRAS scheme that are going to expire by 2026. The great problem we have is that we're going to have a valley of death, because many of those properties will be sold. I know the minister thinks that they will just continue on, but I urge the government to consider extending those currently in the scheme, because you're not going to have enough of a replenishment of stock in between.

The crossbench today is very keen to talk about this. We can fix this. We can turn this around. We need to focus on trades and skills to get the next generation of carpenters and builders. Not enough young people are going into apprenticeships in this space. We need to fix land use planning. We need state, federal and local government to work together. We need to make sure the NRAS continues. I also believe we need to raise rent assistance, because it is just unaffordable. I can't have people in my community living in tents for months on end.

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