Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I support the spirit of this motion. The government's housing investments are meaningful and represent a genuine shift. But, as welcome as these commitments are, they are not yet at the scale the crisis demands. A defining liveability challenge of our time is the collapse of social and affordable housing in Australia and what that means for Australians on the lowest incomes. Last month, Anglicare Australia released its 20th Rental affordability snapshot. Across nearly 49,000 rental listings surveyed nationwide, a single person on JobSeeker could afford just one property in the entire country. That's not 'one in a hundred'—one. There were zero affordable listings for someone on Youth Allowance and zero for most people with a disability. In Western Australia, where median rents have risen 74 per cent since 2021 and now sit at $747 a week, there was not a single affordable property for a person on JobSeeker, not even a room in a share house.

These numbers are not a market anomaly. They reflect a declining policy trajectory spanning decades. In the decades after the war, the government built around 14 of every 100 new homes in Australia. Today, that figure is a seventh of that. It's closer to two in every 100. Governments have spent the last 40 years systematically stepping back from building homes that people on low incomes can actually afford to live in. The private market cannot fix this on its own. Private developers respond to market prices and returns. They do not build homes to lease for rents that working-age payment recipients can afford.

In my home state of Western Australia, Shelter WA estimates a shortfall of nearly 54,000 social and affordable homes. The social housing waitlist now exceeds 151 weeks, which is nearly three years. Think about that. You find yourself in a situation where you need to apply for social housing, and you're told that, yes, you do qualify, but you have to wait nearly three years. How can that be the best we can do? In my Curtin housing policy, boosting government investment in social and affordable housing was identified by my community as the single, most important, policy priority, supported by 85 per cent of community survey respondents. People in my electorate, one of Australia's most advantaged, understand that the social cost of exclusion falls on all of us. They understand that key workers, young people and older Australians on the pension cannot afford to live near the people and services that they support, and they want governments to act. The data on youth homelessness particularly troubles me. On one night in March this year, 73 young people were sleeping rough across Perth, with only three crisis beds available. In 2025, Youth Futures, alone, received 2,575 accommodation requests from young people it simply could not assist.

I want to acknowledge what the 2026 budget got right. The $60 million national youth housing supplement, which fixes what advocates rightly call the youth housing penalty, is a genuine breakthrough. Because young people receive lower income support payments, it means housing providers have faced a financial disincentive to accommodate them. Only two per cent of social housing tenants are under 25, despite young people making up almost 15 per cent of those experiencing homelessness. This reform, which I and many others in this place advocated for, will unlock community housing for more than 4,000 young people, and that matters enormously.

I also welcome the continued delivery of the $9.3 billion National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness and the additional $100 million released from the Housing Australia Future Fund to improve housing for First Nations Australians in remote communities. But I will not pretend that this is enough. Even with all three rounds, the Housing Australia Future Fund is projected to deliver a total of 40,000 homes nationally, a fraction of the estimated shortfall of 640,000 social and affordable dwellings. The annual pipeline needs to be measured in tens of thousands, not thousands, through a long-term legislated commitment.

The path forward is not complicated. It requires sustained long-term federal investment in social and affordable housing, not as a safety net for when the market fails but as a permanent structural component of our housing system, as it was for decades after the war. Fourteen in 100 new builds were social housing after the war. That's where we were. It's less than two in 100 now. That's where we are. We know what we need to do, and I intend to keep pushing until we get there.

Debate interrupted.

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