Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to follow the member for Fowler, another aspirational immigrant just like me, and I thank the crossbench for raising this very important issue. Let me begin by saying that the sins of society wash up in two places. They wash up in public hospitals and they wash up in the judicial system. In my 26 years on the front line in one of the busiest hospitals in this country, I lost count of how many patients I looked after every single day who were homeless.

Let me describe one person to you: Brett. I will never forget Brett. I met him in the emergency department. He was a gentleman in his 30s and he came in with an infection of his leg called cellulitis. It's a common infection. Brett was an otherwise fit gentleman, and he broke down and cried when I saw him. And it still affects me. He said to me: 'Doc, every night I get harassed by the construction workers. They move me on. They don't want me there. They come and push me away, and I have to find another place to sleep.' And so my daily routine with my patients who were homeless was always the same. I would keep them in hospital, and I would usually keep them in hospital longer than necessary just so that they had a feed, had a shower and had somewhere safe to be.

And then, inevitably as night follows day, they were offered crisis accommodation by our hardworking social workers. Crisis accommodation is really not fit for purpose, at least not where I worked in my area. It was often boarding homes with people who had significant mental health issues or drug and alcohol substance abuse problems. They were chaotic, unsafe places, and this is where we discharged our homeless patients to.

But that is not the only face of insecure housing. In my electorate of Higgins, one of the wealthiest electorates in this country, disadvantage hides in plain sight. The median age of my electorate is 37, which means half my population are young people, and in my electorate 42 per cent of private dwellings are renters. They're mostly young people. Fourteen thousand people—adult children—are still living with their parents. During the campaign I doorknocked thousands and thousands of homes, and I frequently was greeted by a young adult, someone in their 20s or sometimes early 30s who would greet me, and I could see clearly from the electorate roll that there were other young adults living in that house.

I met one young woman: Jess. An accomplished young woman in her early 30s, she was a teacher working full time. I met her in an apartment block. She was renting and she pleaded with me. She said: 'Michelle, I have done everything right in life. I have acquired a skill. I have a full-time job. I pay my taxes. I work hard. And I will never be able to own a home.' And she's right. In South Yarra, the median price of a home is $2.2 million. 'Median'—which means half the properties are below that and the other half are above that. Who on earth can afford to live in South Yarra? And yet so many young people gravitate to that area because it's a village and they love it—and why wouldn't they?

So it is of some cold comfort that we have been labelled the richest people in the world. Clearly that is not the case. A week ago Credit Suisse told us that the median wealth for Australian is over $400,000, but clearly a lot of Australians are being left behind. We are taking this problem of housing affordability seriously. You have heard from the other speakers on my side what we doing. The Housing Australia Future Fund is $10 billion devoted to building 30,000 social and affordable homes over a period of five years, of which 10,000 will go to essential workers like nurses, policemen, and people in the emergency services. We've got the Help to Buy scheme, a shared equity program that will release to 10,000 Australians a year, which will help cut the cost of buying a home by up to 40 per cent. We are going to be working with the states and territories, in all three tiers of government, to resolve this wicked problem after a decade of inaction.

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