Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Defence Housing Australia Amendment Bill 2025. This is the first major housing bill of the new parliament. Does it help aspiring homeowners to build their first home? Does it wind back the unfair tax handouts to wealthy property developers or fix the structural inequities in our housing market? Does it directly invest in public housing that Australians desperately need: our nurses, our teachers, our retail workers—those who live in Mildura and Mount Gambier and in all our country towns and regions that can't get housing for their police force or their doctors?

Instead this scheme builds public housing for foreign troops and foreign contractors, under the deeply flawed AUKUS pact. That's right—this government has deemed US troops and US contractors more worthy of public housing than people in Australia who desperately need a roof over their heads. Over 170,000 Australian households are on public housing waitlists. Homelessness in this country is the worst in living memory, according to the many advocacy groups who knock on the door of all of us in this place. What is the government doing? Rushing through a bill that would allow for hundreds of new homes to be built without delay but built for US troops and US defence contractors. The fact that this is the government's priority beggars belief. So much for 'no-one left behind'. So much for 'tackling the housing crisis from every angle', as we've heard the Minister for Housing say in recent days.

This contradiction exposes the rot in Labor's housing priorities. We're in the middle of a national housing crisis, including a severe lack of public housing. The message is clear from this legislation: if you're an American soldier or an American defence contractor, the government will build you a home; if you're an Australian worker, fend for yourself or join the long queue of people looking for public housing. While our homelessness queues grow and there are tents in my own city's national and state parks, funding goes in an unspecified amount—we don't how much—to support other countries' militaries.

The Greens have many issues with this bill. Defence Housing Australia currently provides around 20,000 homes to defence personnel in Australia and their families, and it makes a profit on the housing scheme. However, this bill would expand Defence Housing Australia's main function to include the ability to provide housing and housing related services to foreign government and defence personnel. The government argues that the intention of this bill is to reduce strain on the housing market, but it just paints a clear picture of hypocrisy. Rentals in Perth have become amongst the most expensive in this country—and that's really saying something, if you look at the price of renting in Canberra or in Adelaide. When the Greens urgently call for investment in public housing, the government refuses to act. But, when the US asks, suddenly it's not impossible for governments to build houses anymore, this time for non-Australians.

The scope of changes in this bill is really worrying. In addition to foreign personnel, Defence Housing Australia will also be able to provide housing to foreign military organisations, foreign governments and foreign military contractors and subcontractors. It also allows the minister, by legislative instrument, to add further classes of people to whom Defence Housing Australia may provide housing and housing related services. These broad provisions are one of the many reasons why we needed to see, wanted to see and should have seen an inquiry into this bill. Minister Keogh has said he wants to see the speedy passage of this legislation. Well, that explains why Labor and the Liberals teamed up to veto an inquiry into this legislation in the last sitting fortnight. Now, it's being rammed through the Senate. There is no financial impact statement. It's incredible. We have no idea how much public money Australia will allocate to build homes for the US military in Australia.

This bill will give a blank cheque to the US military and Donald Trump as part of AUKUS. It's deeply concerning that, in a housing crisis, Labor would sooner—would prefer to—provide housing to foreign troops than provide it to the Australians pushed in every city and town in this country to the brink by their policy decisions. That is thousands of Australians on waitlists for public housing, thousands of teachers and nurses who can't get the houses they need to live near their jobs and the services they depend on. This government is focused on funding the wrong homes. Across Australia, housing costs are rising faster than wages, and our social housing system has failed to keep up with demand. According to Everybody's Home, our proportion of social dwellings declined to just 4.1 per cent of the market in 2024. This decline has forced more people into the private rental market, intensifying competition and driving prices higher across the board. Everyone deserves a safe, affordable place to call home. But, for too many Australians, this goal is now completely out of reach. The government has suddenly remembered, in this bill, that it can build houses directly, but this time for US workers and contractors.

Housing is essential for Australians, just like health care, education and child care. We shouldn't be leaving it to the private market. Decades of profit driven policies have left too many people with skyrocketing rents, substandard housing and long-term homelessness. The declining role of the state in building public housing stock in our country has significantly contributed to the decline in housing affordability for both renters and first home buyers in our housing system. In a housing crisis, the supply of homes cannot be left to private developers whose profits increase the more that house prices and rents go up.

We just need the government to care as much about building public housing for Australians as they clearly do for US troops. Maybe they could take inspiration from the Greens policy for a public property developer and build 610,000 homes over the next decade. Let's have housing for all Australians. This is the kind of ambition needed to fix the housing crisis, not just tinkering, and especially not tinkering in ways, like those of the amendments to the deposit scheme that we heard about this morning that are being brought forward by the housing minister, that drive demand. They will feed demand, push up exploding prices even further and a lock out first home buyers. Less tinkering; more structural change.

Part of the justification for this bill is to provide housing for US troops stationed in WA as part of the AUKUS submarine base in Fremantle. AUKUS is a dud deal. We need to get out of it. AUKUS is supposedly a trilateral partnership, and Australia has drawn the short end of the stick. We bear the brunt of both the cost and the risk. While the US and the UK are reviewing the pact, the major parties have doubled down, committing to a shroud of silence and secrecy.

We know the US or the UK could pull out of the submarine deal with just a year's notice if either nation decides the deal weakens their own nuclear submarine programs, yet we've already sent at least $1.6 billion to the US for their own domestic shipbuilding industry. We're also paying the UK around $4.6 billion to assist theirs. We don't have any clawback provisions. Recent polling shows that most Australians believe we'll never receive the AUKUS submarines, and they can see this dud deal for what it is. Australians have never had the chance to properly vote on AUKUS, something that fundamentally undermines our sovereignty and diverts crucial funds from housing, education and health care. How is this fair? How is it sensible?

I and many Australians are greatly concerned about our increasing dependency on the US, led by an unpredictable bully. We know Australia is complicit in unjust US wars. Donald Trump has effective control of all US marine spy bases, bomber jets and nuclear submarines across Australia. As the US lurches further to the unpredictable right and the costs of AUKUS submarines spiral upwards into the hundreds of billions, now is the time to end the dangerous AUKUS gamble with our security. Instead, we get bills like this which further entrench this pact.

We also get bills like last year's Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2024. That bill, now an act, allows the government to pick any place in Australia as a potential nuclear waste dump without any proper consultation with communities and Indigenous owners. It explicitly listed Osborne, in my state of South Australia, as home to a nuclear waste dump. The local community was absolutely blindsided. They were not informed or consulted. The dump is close to a residential area and right on the waterway, where 30,000 people live nearby. When interviewed on 7.30, Minister Butler said that a dump in his electorate would go ahead 'even if the residents did not want it'. Well, Minister Butler, they do not want it. I've been an active campaigner against nuclear waste dumps in South Australia for a long time, and so have thousands of South Australians. We don't want it anywhere near us. This is not democracy. This is against the wishes of the Port Adelaide Enfield Council, who have resolved to strongly oppose any nuclear waste storage or disposal at Osborne. It's against the wishes of so many South Australians who remember the devastating impact that British atomic testing at Maralinga had on our Indigenous people.

The corrosive AUKUS pact puts the wants and needs of the US above the wellbeing of our communities, and we see that again in this bill. We need to end AUKUS and invest in peace, security and housing for all Australians who need it. Australians want us to develop our own independent foreign policy that defends Australia and does not continue to act as an arm of the US military.

This bill makes it clear that the only public housing Labor and the Liberals really want to spend money on is for the US military and for US weapons contractors living on Australian soil, all while hundreds of thousands of Australians wait for decades on public housing waitlists. Both major parties are not taking the scale of this issue seriously enough. They are tinkering at the edges, and much of their tinkering makes the problem worse by feeding demand and giving enormous tax breaks to wealthy property investors. That tinkering makes things worse for all those first home buyers and young people who are paying excessive rent or unable to get into the housing market.

Both major parties have entered this parliament with a handful of meek offerings that will do little to challenge the massive problems in our housing system. In a wealthy country like ours, housing should not be something Australians struggle to get access to. It should not be something we build for US defence workers and contractors. It is shameful, and we need immediate, big structural reforms on our housing crisis. The options we see from the major parties are clear choices by our governments that compound their mis-decisions of the last 20 years.

This bill shows we can build public housing, and we need to get on with it. But we need to build housing for Australian people in our regions, towns and cities who can't get it right now. While the major parties play politics here in Canberra with housing, people all over Australia are experiencing the devastating reality of soaring rents, crippling mortgage stress, acute homelessness, increased homelessness and a lack of truly affordable homes. This government needs to take the Australian housing crisis seriously, and Labor need to step up and build homes for Australians. Build the public housing we need, not the foreign Defence workers' and contractors' housing that will squeeze out Australians' own need for solutions to the housing crisis.