Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'll withdraw and proceed. Labor and the Liberals will break our own laws to indefinitely detain a refugee fleeing persecution, but they will let the CEO who illegally fired 1,800 workers walk away with a $20 million payout. Labor and the Liberals will subject refugees to systemic abuse in detention centres in places like Manus Island, but will give less than a slap on the wrist to the big banks found to be engaging in systemic misconduct and exploitation. Labor and the Liberals are now deporting hundreds of refugees to Nauru, a very poor country in the Pacific, but they are giving gas corporation Santos, who let a methane leak go on for 20 years, a huge tax break. It's about hypocrisy; Labor and the Liberals protect the rich and powerful, and they throw the defenceless under the bus.

The great Tony Benn once said, 'The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.' That's Tony Benn, not me. Let's not let them get away with it—for refugees, for the rest of us. Do you know who's causing the housing crisis? Labor and the coalition. Do you know who's not? Immigrants.

Here are the facts. We had next to zero immigration during COVID. Did house prices fall or flatline? No. They increased dramatically. Over the past decade, the population has increased by 16 per cent and dwellings by 19 per cent. The truth is, it's incredibly convenient for the major parties to blame immigrants for the housing crisis because it lets the real culprits off the hook. Labor and the coalition are on a unity ticket, turbocharging the housing crisis via negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

Labor and the coalition are on a unity ticket, abandoning any real effort to build public housing like governments used to. A quarter of the homes built post-World War II were public housing—that's 25 per cent public housing—and now it's just one per cent. Pathetic.

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