Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Housing is a human right and it should not be treated like a commodity. Just like the rest of the nation, Queensland is in a housing and homelessness crisis. Over the last few months, I've met with organisations right around the state, like the North Queensland Domestic Violence Resource Service in Townsville, the Women's Centre FNQ in Cairns and the Cairns Homelessness Services Hub. Every single support service I met with told me the same story: they are doing everything they can, but there is no crisis housing, there is no transitional housing and there is no long-term public or private housing to send people to.

These services are relying on miniscule budgets to put people up in hotel accommodation. Budgets that were meant to last for a whole year are running out by the end of February. There are 47,000 people on the social housing waiting list in Queensland, and almost 9,000 of them are children. The average wait time is two years, but many people wait far longer than that. While they wait, they move from insecure accommodation to insecure accommodation, or they stay in abusive relationships because they've got nowhere else to go, or they sleep in cars, or they risk losing work and regular attendance at school or university, because they cannot find a home.

It's even harder for people with disability who are looking for homes that they can safely access. For First Nations people or people from CALD communities, for whom navigating a complex social housing system is overwhelming, it's harder again. A woman in Yarrabah rang my office about an hour ago saying that she's been on the social housing waiting list for 23 years. She now has three kids who need a roof over their heads, too. I spoke to a woman on the Sunshine Coast who's living on the age pension. She was facing eviction into homelessness after her rent was increased by $80 a week by a profiteering landlord looking to cash in on the influx of people moving up from Melbourne and Sydney to avoid lockdowns. There are no other suitable, affordable homes for her on the market. Her experience is similar to that of so many other older women, which is why older women are the fastest-growing demographic of homeless folk in this nation.

Another young woman was given crisis accommodation during the first COVID lockdown measures in April 2020, but once that was no longer available she had to sleep in her car. My office managed to advocate for her and helped her find appropriate housing through a local provider, but those local providers are overstretched and under-resourced. It shouldn't take individual lobbying for every Queenslander to find a safe, accessible and affordable home. Towns in Queensland are facing a chronic undersupply of public and private housing. This is a national crisis. But the Liberal, National and Labor parties continue to accept massive donations from the property development industry, to the tune of almost $30 million since 2012. So, their policies benefit developers, investors and the banks and those policies stay in place. Under this government, it's cheaper to buy your fifth or sixth home than your first. It is a national disgrace. Everyone deserves a home.