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

I rise to speak on the national housing crisis. This country is at breaking point. The great Australian dream of owning a home is dead, thanks to Labor. Barely a day goes past without new horrific housing news. There are no affordable houses for first home buyers in any city across this whole country. It's now more challenging to get into the market than it has ever been. But, rather than fix the housing crisis, this government is spending more on housing-investor tax breaks, every year, than on social housing, homelessness services and rent assistance combined. As to the National Housing Accord, it has promised us 1.2 million new homes over five years; every month it's falling further and further behind. So shame on this government.

Housing affordability is a political choice, and we can choose much better. It used to be that, if you worked hard, got an education and saved, you could afford a home and support a family. This is no longer true. Homeownership rates among 25- to 29-year-olds have fallen from 50 per cent to 36 per cent in the 50 years to 2021. Young people face house price growth which outstrips their wages, forcing them into too many years of renting under precarious leases. For countless people, owning a home is no longer a realistic milestone. This means moving every year, living with uncertainty and constantly putting off goals like starting a family. The prices of entry-level houses have grown three times faster than wages in the last five years. And it's not just buying a home. National rents have increased 2½ times faster than wages over the same period.

Our housing system is now a generational lottery. And it's no accident; it's by design. It's by policy and government failure. It's working exactly as the major parties have designed it to work. They have built an economic system where working people pay, on average, 24 per cent of their wages in tax. Meanwhile, very wealthy people sit on multimillion-dollar land and home portfolios, watching their value surge, getting richer every day, with gains that are lightly taxed or deferred for tax for years. So our economic system taxes effort and rewards speculation. We tax work so much more than wealth, including speculative housing wealth. Labor's tax breaks help investors come armed with deeper pockets—with, on average, $100,000 more in their pocket than a first homebuyer—to auctions every weekend, ensuring they outbid hardworking first home buyers who have scrimped for years to save their precious deposit.

Wages crawl; assets explode in value; taxes aid wealth concentration. And politicians act confused about why young people are angry and can't afford to save harder to bid at those auctions successfully!

Working Australians are fed up. They're fed up watching banks and wealthy property investors profit from a housing crisis spiralling out of control, while wages stagnate and basic shelter becomes a privilege instead of a right. The social contract is broken. Labor has the responsibility to stop rewarding the wealthy and start ensuring every Australian can afford a home.

It's not just Australians who are concerned about our housing crisis here and its historic nature. It has drawn the attention of the international community. Just this week, the UN has published a major review that says Australia must do more to protect our basic rights, highlighting poverty, housing, social security failure, climate impacts and ongoing asylum concerns. In particular, the UN called out Australia's 'persistent shortage of affordable housing' and the insufficient availability of social housing, resulting in very long waiting lists and increased homelessness. When did we become this country? When the UN is telling a rich country like us to do better on housing, the government needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. Surely that's a wake-up call. Even the UN is telling Labor to get on with its National Housing and Homelessness Plan, which we're still waiting for, and to make sure we adopt a human rights based national approach to housing.

We need to invest more in social housing. We need to strengthen rent regulation, enhance tenant protections and prevent excessive rent increases in public and private housing. We need to prevent the speculative misuse of housing, ensure adequate housing for Indigenous Australians and other disadvantaged groups, and increase the levels of Commonwealth rent assistance. These are practical reforms that the Greens have been fighting for for years. What are Labor for if not to deal with this basic issue of a roof over your head and fix this incredible crisis affecting so many millions of Australians?

To make housing truly affordable, we need more public housing. If you look around the world, countries with affordable housing all have one thing in common: they have a large role for the public sector in housing, as we have had historically when we weren't in the kind of crisis we face right now. The declining role of government in building housing stock in Australia, both for sale to homeowner-occupiers and for affordable rent through the public housing system, is driving the decline in housing affordability both for renters and for homebuyers in our housing market. In this housing crisis, the supply of homes cannot be left to private developers whose profits increase the more house prices and rents go up.

Over the past 30 years, the major parties together have worsened housing affordability, grown public housing waiting lists and turned housing from a human right into a commodity. According to ACOSS, social housing now makes up less than two per cent of dwellings built annually. This is down from 22 per cent in the 1950s and 15 per cent in the 1970s. In Australia, there are now 190,000 households on the public housing waitlist. That's an increase of 50,000 houses just since 2018. The waitlists exceed 10 years in every state and territory. As a consequence, homelessness levels have risen to the worst in living memory, and they're deeply shocking to many of us in Australia who think homelessness should not be a scourge of every Australian city. As a consequence, that homelessness is putting so many children and so many women at risk, and this is a national shame. It's a scandal. But both parties have played their role in creating it. Now it's on Labor. With more than four years in power, it has failed spectacularly to address this crisis. Indeed, many of its measures have made the problem worse. This government must directly build more quality public and affordable homes.

I say to every Australian struggling through the housing crisis: if you feel like you can't get ahead, you're not alone. The system is rigged. It's stacked against you. Where we are now is the result of successive governments, but it is fixable. Our history tells us we are a country that can fix this. We can live differently. We can put a roof over everyone's head. We have fixed it before.

Politics should deliver for all of us. Instead, politicians from the major parties are delivering for the banks. Just look at their profits in the last few months—record levels, billions of dollars rolling in because of growth in very expensive housing lending. We've got big developers making a motza out of the housing crisis and the ultra wealthy growing their wealth without doing anything other anything than speculatively investing. Our government is spending more on tax breaks for wealthy property investors than on the neediest members of our society. While so many Australians work harder than ever and have never been more time poor, big banks are making record profits ripping us off, and the ultra wealthy are getting richer than ever before. It's intergenerational inequality on steroids, and it's inequality between workers and the wealthy on steroids. It is like nothing we have ever seen before in what we used to think of as the lucky country—a lucky country where you now can't afford a home as a first home buyer. Unless we do something different, it'll keep getting worse.

But it doesn't have to be like this. If the crisis was started through government choices, it can be fixed through government choices as well. We need to put a roof over everyone's head. We need a National Housing and Homelessness Plan. We are waiting on Labor to deliver it. No more bandaids—a proper national plan. We need to stop treating housing as an asset class that serves only the wealthy few and to reclaim housing as a human right.