Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This legislation purports to address the housing challenge. As many other participants in the debate have pointed out, it is not going to do a great deal about that. We support the legislation. We support measures to improve tax transparency, but in no way is this legislation an adequate response to the challenges which are facing Australians in relation to housing, and in no way has the government provided more generally an adequate policy response to the challenges of housing.

In fact, in the not very long time that I've been here, 2½ years, all I have witnessed is a government completely unable to come to grips with this challenge—organisationally in terms of their ministerial and shadow cabinet arrangements but also bureaucratically. Every time we seek information about how the government is responding to the housing crisis, we get given about three different departments—the names of three different groups of people who may or may not be responsible or leading a particular initiative. We get told that one group of people in Treasury is responsible for leading an initiative and then we find out subsequently that actually Prime Minister and Cabinet have had to step in and they are now leading some sort of working group that's convening, and shortly to be replaced by, an IDC. There is total confusion within the Commonwealth about what the goals are for housing policy, who is responsible for leading it within the bureaucracy and what the key actions are to reach those goals.

The fact that the bill before the chamber today purports to be a bill to address housing but, in fact, really addresses important but, in the context of housing policy, relatively insignificant tax measures says a great deal about how the government's approaching this. It's a great shame, because we do actually have quite a significant problem. There is a very big problem with a lack of affordable rental properties. Every year, Anglicare do this terrific survey where they look at what proportion of the rental properties on the market would be available to certain kinds of income groups. When they looked at it last year, they found that singles on the age pension could afford just 2.1 per cent of the 75,000 properties that they surveyed. Think about that: if you are on the age pension and trying to exist in the private rental market, just 2.1 per cent of the properties available would be suitable for you.

There is a kind of a myth—and I hear the National Party say this often—'All you have to do is move to Orange' or 'All you have to do is move to the country.' It's a problem in regional areas as well. People on Newstart would only be able to afford 15 per cent of the 18,000 regional properties that were surveyed in this process. Even double-income families struggle. A household with two kids and two parents on a minimum wage would be able to afford just 26 per cent of the surveyed properties. If that same family were trying to get by on Newstart, they'd have access to only 1.9 per cent of the surveyed properties. It's a big problem and it requires a serious solution. We know that one solution that works is public housing.

When we measure housing stress, a common measure of housing stress is when your housing costs are greater than 30 per cent of your disposable income and the household income is in the bottom 40 per cent of all households. Well, only half a per cent of people in public housing are in that category. One of the key benefits of public housing is that it does represent a serious and effective response to housing stress for very low-income people. Unfortunately, more than 40 per cent of all Australians who are receiving Commonwealth rent assistance are in housing stress. They spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Horrifyingly, 13 per cent of them spend more than 50 per cent of their income on rent. These are issues that should shock us and it should be a time when we're thinking about how to provide more public housing and how to provide more social housing.

There's been a very significant decrease in the number of public rental housing households. Between 2007 and 2014, the number of public rental households decreased from 331,000 to 317,000, a fall of four per cent. Quite a bit of that reflects a transfer of stock from public housing to community housing, because in the same period the number of mainstream community-housing households has almost doubled. It's risen very substantially. But this shifting, this pea-and-thimble trick, doesn't really go to the core of the problem. There is simply not enough affordable housing available for people who need it.

We talk a lot about the pressures in capital cities. In fact, you sometimes get the impression that the main thing that drives our capital city newspapers is the property section. It's hard to go by any day of the week where there isn't a story about house prices in Sydney or Melbourne. But, actually, it is a really big problem in regional areas. I think senators will know that I grew up on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, and as a senator I have occasion to visit the communities on the North Coast of New South Wales. I spent a little bit of time earlier in the year with the Coffs Harbour Neighbourhood Centre. They tell me that Coffs Harbour actually doesn't have any crisis accommodation at all. The neighbourhood centre is in a lovely building. It's an old school. It's got one of those old school verandahs that people might remember from when they went to school—you used to hang your bag on the peg on the verandah. The good people at the Coffs Harbour Neighbourhood Centre have repurposed that area of their building. It's now a shelter for sometimes 20, sometimes 30, people living in Coffs Harbour who really don't have anywhere to go each evening. There is no crisis accommodation. The neighbourhood centre is not in a position to provide crisis accommodation for these people, but they are able to provide them with a place out of the rain—albeit not inside, but a place on a verandah out of the rain—where they can get a little bit of food in the morning and actually get a little bit of care. They assist these desperate people in their desperate circumstances.

It's troubling that there isn't a more structured response to these problems in our regions. Places like Coffs Harbour might not be growing as fast as the rest of the state, but it's still projected to grow very significantly between now and 2050. I struggle to get any real sense that either the state government in New South Wales or the Commonwealth government is thinking seriously about how these coastal areas cope with some very specific challenges that they face in terms of housing.

Shelter NSW, the peak group that represents housing providers and advocates on housing issues, did some great work, which they released in March this year, which took a look at regional perspectives on housing and homelessness. It's a very useful document, and I encourage senators to go and have a look at it. They go region by region and create a very specific breakdown of the kinds of issues in each of those places that are confronting those communities. In Coffs Harbour, they're finding that house prices and rents on the coast are pushing people westward for affordable rentals. Locally, certain areas have remained affordable, but the housing is run down and the market is becoming very geographically stratified. In a small town everyone knows everyone else, and there are sometimes families—a lot of people with the same name—and it only takes one person with your surname in your family to do the wrong thing for everybody in that family to be shut out of the rental market, because real estate agents are willing to apply essentially discriminatory practices in accepting or rejecting tenants.

The development of university campuses increases competition for housing. Students tend to displace locals, especially in low-end housing. In coastal towns like Coffs Harbour and my own community on the Tweed, there is huge seasonal variation in rental prices. Rents go up dramatically over Christmas and people can find themselves homeless at that point, particularly if you've got a lease that ends in the summer; it's likely that that won't be renewed because the owner is in a position to chase much higher rents from temporary holiday rentals.

There are some real challenges in regional Australia with housing. There are real challenges across the country, but the problem with the bill before us and with all of the policy settings presented by the coalition is that they're not addressing this in any systematic, focused or energetic way. There is a disregard for the issue and an apparent unwillingness to take it seriously. Labor has put a range of policies on the table, particularly around tax, negative gearing and capital gains reform. Unfortunately, these—