David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

If you haven't already bought a house in Sydney, it's basically impossible to do it now. Even with two wages, most families can't manage the obscene mortgages required for what used to be called a first home. Workers have been pushed hours away from their workplaces, having to start and end days with hours stuck in banked-up traffic, losing precious family time. Our city's losing the people that make it function and make it special.

But now an opportunity does present, with Defence no longer needing Victoria Barracks in Sydney, and in other big cities like Melbourne and Brisbane there's some prime publicly owned land that could deliver genuine public housing. So what does Labor do? They reach for the same tired playbook of privatisation and giving a gift to their developer mates. Instead of seeing this as a chance to recycle public Defence land for other public housing and other public good, we see Labor having a national sell-off of prize Defence land and prize assets to their developer mates for private profit, not public good.

Privatisation is not a successful housing policy. It's handing public assets to developer mates and hoping that a few crumbs of affordable housing fall from the table. For those being pushed out of the places they call home by spiralling costs, a tiny number of apartments are available at 30 per cent below market rent for maybe 10 or 15 years. That's not a plan for housing; it's an embarrassment.

Victoria Barracks in Sydney is a beautiful public space—green open space, beautiful built heritage. That's exactly why it must be used for maximum public benefit, not to maximise private profit. Build public housing here, real public housing—hundreds of homes owned by the public for those who need it the most and kept in public hands for generations to come. But we also say this: density done right means public parklands, not concrete jungles. It means communities can breathe, children can play, families can thrive and heritage is respected.

Labor keeps telling us that only private developers can deliver housing at scale. That's simply not true. Governments built hundreds of thousands of public homes in the postwar era. We did it before. In fact, there's a working model for Commonwealth public housing right now, with Defence Housing building thousands of homes for the defence community. We can do this. But Labor would rather just give developers profits than community benefit. A national flog-off of public land for private profit—it has Labor written all over it. If Labor were serious about delivering public housing, truly serious, they'd prove it here with Victoria Barracks. They'd keep the land in public hands. They'd build bold. They'd build green. They'd build for the future. Instead, they're preparing to flog it off to the highest bidder for grossly unaffordable private housing, and they call it progress. Well, we call that out.

Pauline Hanson says she fights for battlers and for ordinary Australians. She says that the people to blame for the fact that you're doing it tough now are immigrants. When was the last time you flew to a party on a billionaire's private jet? Is that something your neighbour has ever done? Last October, while you were struggling with the cost of living, Senator Hanson was on Gina Rinehart's private Gulfstream G700, jetting off to Trump's Mar-a-Lago for a Halloween party. Conference tickets were 25 grand a pop. That's the Pauline Hanson's One Nation idea of struggle. She's skipped representing the community in this place so she could be there. She missed votes in the Senate on things like housing and health care. She didn't even initially declare she was off on a private jet from a billionaire. Where do One Nation get their funding? Many people, including three rich fund managers, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to One Nation after Gina Rinehart wined and dined them with Trump on a luxury yacht.

Let's be clear. Gina Rinehart cares about politics so she can use it to shift blame for hardships from billionaires like herself and the corporate profits they're reaping to migrants who are struggling right along with everyone else. It's One Nation's trick too. Housing crisis? Blame migrants. Cost of living? Blame migrants. Can't find work? Blame migrants. Senator Hanson blames migrants for problems created by billionaires, then she takes those billionaires' money and takes those billionaires' jets. It'd be a joke if it weren't real.

Today, on Tamil Oppression Day, the Greens stand in solidarity with the Tamil people, who continue to endure systemic oppression and denial of their fundamental rights. It's not merely a historical tragedy; it continues today. The Tamil homeland remains one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world. Security forces occupy private land; they suppress cultural expression. Tamil political prisoners languish without charge or trial—many for decades—in jail, and journalists documenting those abuses face intimidation and violence. We see land seizures fragmenting Tamil communities. Just in recent days, large protests have erupted across the north-east against the Kivul Oya irrigation project—another development scheme that Tamil communities warn will bring further land appropriation, forced displacement and demographic change. We see families still searching for disappeared loved ones, while mass graves remain uninvestigated. They're not isolated incidents; they form a coordinated pattern that international legal experts recognise as indicators of a past and ongoing genocide.

The Greens believe human rights are universal. We can't champion justice while remaining silent on genocide or promote a rules based order while ignoring these fundamental principles. Australia must not be complicit. We must suspend security cooperation with institutions implicated in these abuses, support international accountability mechanisms and protect Tamil asylum seekers here in this country, not forcibly try and return them to danger or displace them off to cruelty in Nauru. The Tamil struggle is a struggle for survival, for cultural preservation and for the right to exist on ancestral lands—principles we hold sacred. I've got to say the Tamil community in my beautiful hometown of Sydney provides so much spark, so much colour and so much positive energy there. We call on the Australian government to uphold its obligations under the genocide convention and the refugee convention. We call on this parliament to use its voice for moral authority and to demand justice, and we note today as Tamil Oppression Day for that purpose.

While I am speaking here, hundreds of people from the broader Kurdish community across Australia are gathering outside the parliament. They're gathering outside the parliament, asking us to shine a light on what's happening in north-east and northern Syria. I want to note that strong Kurdish Australian representatives such as Councillor Mira Ibrahim from Liverpool; Young Greens Kurds like Baran Sogut from the Federation of Democratic Kurdish Society; Brusk Aeiveri, the Co-chair of the Federation of Democratic Kurdish Society; and Greens councillor and proud Kurdish representative Ismet Tastan, from the Inner West Council, are here in numbers. They're saying the struggle for gender equality, for religious freedom and for people to live a respectful life, regardless of their ethnicity, their gender and their religion, is a struggle that's happening right now in north-east Syria.

I travelled last year to the democratic autonomous region of north-east Syria, and I saw firsthand a regime that was putting in place radical gender equality in that region. All of the key positions have co-chairs—a man and a woman. I saw, as well, that the whole rainbow of Syrian society—not just Kurds, not just Syriacs, not just Arabs, not just Yazidis—was being represented.

Right now, that experiment in democracy and gender equality is facing brutal repression. We know that there are about a million people in Kurdish-majority Kobani who are being surrounded. The reports that have come to my office of some of the violence that's happening in the surrounding villages are deeply disturbing. The violence reminds that community of the appallingly violent takeover of ISIS and the fight—led in many cases by strong Kurdish women—to defeat ISIS, and they fear its return. What has the Australian government said? Not one word. In the north-east of Syria, where the Kurds and their allies have been keeping the world safe from tens of thousands of ISIS fighters—initially with the support of the United States, but recently they've dropped them like a gun—they're being abandoned again.

The Kurds, the Yazidis and their friends have been on the front line of fighting ISIS, and they're asking the world not to be blind to what's happening now—to see what's happening and to ensure that their rights are respected. I join their call. Our government's silence must end. We must be a force for good and for understanding this unique achievement in north-east Syria.