Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are living through a rental crisis. Today, yet again, we have confirmation that Hobart, in my home state of Tasmania, is the most unaffordable city in the country for renters. This is not just a policy failure; this is actually a policy design. It's a policy design endorsed by both of the major parties in this place, the political duopoly.

Both of the major parties in this place regard landlords as a protected species, and the political duopoly in this place will stop at nothing to make sure that landlords are able to make as much money from rents as possible. They, the Coles and Woolworths of politics, have decided that the only constituency they want to win is the people who own homes, especially those who own multiple homes. The Liberals don't care about tenants and the Labor Party arrogantly assume that tenants will just vote for them anyway. Together, they hand over billions of dollars a year in subsidies to landlords in the form of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, and they refuse to build the public housing necessary to address the crisis. It is absolutely perverse.

Tenants are bled dry with unaffordable rents, and then, when they pay tax, the major parties get together to hand that tax over to the landlords. Then the RBA jacks up interest rates, and the increase in the cost of borrowing is passed on by the landlords to the tenants in the form of even higher rents. It's a rigged system. We're on our way to neo-feudalism in Australia. The tenants always lose. That's why we need a national freeze on rents in this country and we need it now.