David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I again want to highlight housing affordability across Australia. Today, National Shelter and SGS Economics & Planning released the 11th national Rental Affordability Index. As we all know, it's very sobering reading. We are in a housing crisis across the country. It's very easy to talk about it in terms of statistics, but we need to remember that there are people in our communities who are struggling to put food on the table due to the cost of housing.

Canberra is at the forefront of this housing crisis. We currently have a shortfall of over 3,100 social houses. Under the very welcome HAF, we stand to get 540 or so houses. Clearly, there's a lot of work to be done on this. I would really like to thank National Shelter, ACT Shelter and others for the work they are doing on continuing to highlight the depth and breadth of this issue.

I implore senators to work together to ensure that we can have a conversation in Australia about what housing is for. My sense in talking to people across the ACT is that people want housing to be viewed more as a human right, as something that people in our communities can afford, rather than as an investment vehicle that seems to forever be putting it more and more out of reach for younger generations and the most vulnerable in our communities.