Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I campaigned on three priorities, and I've come into this place to talk about those three priorities, and, as long as I'm here and I'm talking about them, I think I'm doing the job I was elected to do. Two of those are what I think of as my 'head' priorities, and those are housing affordability and energy affordability. One of them is my 'heart' priority, which is health care and disability care. Of course, sometimes it's hard to know really which one is necessarily the 'head' one and which one is the 'heart' one, because affordable health care is also a core economic need—not just in the home, where being able to see a doctor who bulk-bills is good for the back pocket; it's also good for the economy if people are able to get the health care that they need when they need it, as it saves money later down the track.

But the priority, and it is one of my heart priorities, that I want to talk about tonight is housing. It's probably my No. 1 priority. It is certainly true that, over the last 40 years, Australia has not built enough houses. It's no coincidence, I think, that the Liberal Party—the coalition—was in government for most of those 40 years, federally, and completely vacated the field when it came to building public housing.

There's one couple that I want to talk about tonight, and that's Scott and Ann-Marie of Bethania. When I called them earlier and I said, 'How's it going?' she said, 'What—the house hunt, the mental health or the stress?' She is, at the moment, facing eviction in the next couple of months and desperately looking for somewhere to live. She told me that that she and Scott are on the disability support pension and the carer's pension. Amazingly—and in an economic policy like housing, this shows how heartless the LNP government is in Queensland—the LNP state government has changed the rules so that they are now facing homelessness, and, if they become homeless, they won't be able to access the emergency support that has been there in the past. That's because—and you will never believe this—even though they are on the DSP, they no longer qualify for public housing in Queensland. That means that, if they end up sleeping in a car, they're not going to be able to get emergency support to be able to stay in a motel while that house is found. Unless they can get on to the public housing waiting list—and, by the way, I think it's false advertising to call it a 'waiting list', because the idea is that, if you wait long enough, you'll get public housing, but that's not going to happen; you can be on that list for ages. But, unless they get themselves on that list, they're not going to be able to get the help that they need if they become homeless, as happens to so many people in my community. I've got more stories like that which I've told, and more, unfortunately, I can continue to tell.

So it is no coincidence that, after almost 30 years of federal Liberal governments, we have this housing crisis. That is because—I think, for an ideological reason—they absented themselves from the field. One of the most striking figures is that, over their nine or 10 years in government, across the whole of Australia, they built 373 public housing dwellings—373. They just completely dropped the ball. In fact, they didn't even have a minister for housing for a large part of their tenure.

In contrast, the Albanese Labor government is picking up the pieces, and right now we're building 206 houses in Logan Reserve alone—in one suburb in Forde alone, 206. So, effectively, we're building half as many public housing dwellings in Forde, in one term, as the previous government built across the whole of the country, over nine years.

Finally, why I think this is fundamentally an economic issue is that it was definitely the post-war Australian experience that governments built public housing—not out of the goodness of their heart, but because, if you build public housing, if you can keep the cost of living down and if you can keep the cost of rents down, then that actually helps the economy as a whole. It was the secret. In fact, in South Australia at the high point, of all the rental dwellings in South Australia something like 40 per cent was public housing. And public housing wasn't just there for the people that desperately needed it; it was there for car workers and railway workers and teachers. In fact, it was written in to the South Australian Housing Trust that it was there to assist in the economic development of the state—just as public housing should be now, too.

House adjourned at 20 : 00

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Lawrence ) took the chair at 09:30.

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