Charlotte Walker (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Listening to One Nation lecture this chamber about young Australians and housing affordability is pretty chopped. This is a party that has built an entire business model around keeping people angry while voting against the very reforms that would actually help them. Now, suddenly they're screaming, crying, throwing up on behalf of young people struggling with rent and mortgages—okay—because when housing reform comes before this parliament, One Nation's instinct is almost always the same: vote no, complain loudly then blame migrants for the consequences. That's the entire cycle. They are offering no solutions to younger Australians; they are offering scapegoats. It is incredibly telling that every complex economic issue somehow ends up in their worldview being the fault of immigrants, international students or foreigners. A fun fact for Senator Hanson: foreign buyers make up just 0.8 per cent of all buyers in Australia's housing market, and foreign purchases of existing homes have been banned.

Historically, Australia has underbuilt housing for years, construction costs have exploded globally, supply chains have been disrupted, wages have stagnated relative to housing costs, and governments everywhere have struggled with planning, bottlenecks and infrastructure lag. Those are the actual structural problems. But structural problems require serious policy work and One Nation is not a serious political party; it's a rage-bait machine. And the irony is unbelievable when they try to frame themselves as anti-elite outsiders while seeming pretty happy to take support from extremely wealthy interests and billionaires who benefit from keeping the status quo exactly as it is. Because let's be real here, the billionaires funding right-wing grievance politics are not lying awake at night worrying about a 25-year-old renter trying to save for a deposit in Adelaide; they are doing just fine.

The people hurt most by culture war politics are ordinary Australians who get fed anger instead of outcomes, and younger Australians are getting increasingly tired of it. They are tired of politicians treating their economic future like a comment section on Facebook. They are tired of hearing simplistic nonsense dressed up as economic analysis, and they're tired of being used as props by people who have absolutely no interest in delivering the reforms required to actually make housing more affordable. Because if One Nation genuinely cared about younger Australians, they would support increasing housing supply. They would support social and affordable housing. They would support practical medium-density development in our cities. They would support policies that help renters instead of just yelling into microphones about the system. Instead, they vote against reform and act shocked as the crisis continues. That is not leadership; that is their performance art.

While we're on the topic of younger Australians, it's interesting that Senator Hanson suddenly seems deeply concerned about us when, in her most recent instalment of 'please explain', she was perfectly happy to depict me as a child defecating and needing a nappy. For the record, I am 22 years old and have been out of nappies for about 20 years. Apparently young Australians are old enough to inherit climate instability, unaffordable housing, insecure work and economic pressures they did not create, but, if we step forward and participate in our democracy, we are ridiculed for our age. That attitude is part of why so many young Australians are disillusioned with politics in the first place.

I think my generation represents something One Nation clearly finds threatening—younger people entering public life who are informed, engaged and not interested in recycling the same tired fear campaigns from the nineties, because younger Australians are not stupid, and younger Australians aren't scared to question or get into the nitty-gritty, and that is intimidating to Senator Hanson. Young people like me turn up to parliament when required—not be off taking naps during question time just so you're fresh for your tough interviews on 'Sky after dark'. Senator Hanson likes to mock young people, yet she's terrified of the ABC and sitting next to the public on a plane, and she spends a large portion of her time worrying about how long her new MP will last in her shambles of a party.

Young Australians understand that migration has always been a part of Australia's economic story. We understand migrants are workers: nurses, teachers, tradies, researchers and small-business owners. We understand that you cannot build a stronger economy by permanently turning Australians against one another.