Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

It's clear that our housing system—our housing crisis—is a matter of public importance, so I'm delighted to stand up and talk about it. That crisis has a number of parents. It has parents on both sides of this house. This motion only acknowledges Labor's role, and it is a very significant role over decades, in being a parent to this crisis. But we have to acknowledge that there were decades of inaction on the conservative side of politics that have landed us in the spot where we are today, where we have millions of people in dire housing insecurity.

We were warned about this as an outcome of deliberate policy decisions many years ago. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute put out a report two decades ago sounding the alarm that our housing system is and was, from that time 20 years ago, structurally unsustainable from an intergenerational perspective. We had tax policy put in place that would bring that result, and it surely has. Those researchers warned us the burden would fall most heavily on young people, those denied homeownership and those increasingly dependent—the 31 per cent of Australians now who are totally dependent—on rental accommodation. What did the Labor and Liberal governments do in response to all of that data, all of that prediction and all of that reliable research? They did nothing. We've kept in place a tax policy which has failed us and has landed generations of people in a disastrous housing situation.

Most Australians—nearly 90 per cent—use the language of and recognise this as a crisis. They recognise it as a crisis whether they are parents or grandparents or young people or people at school. The committee I'm chairing, the Select Committee on Intergenerational Housing Inequity, at present has had submissions from people who are 13 years old talking about the fear and the loss of hope that that very young generation has about the state of housing affordability that lies ahead for them. It is a dominant concern for so many Australians and no surprise, given that house prices have increased by 400 per cent since 1989, courtesy of both the major parties. And those are the Treasurer's own numbers.

Over recent decades we've experienced a really significant fall in homeownership, nowhere more seriously than for young people aged 25 to 34, where homeownership has fallen from 61 per cent in 1981 to 43 per cent in 2021. It's only gone down further from that. Young people are giving up hope, and they've turned to rental accommodation, where they are facing massive increases in rent as a consequence. So many young people in every city in Australia are living in serious financial stress because of rent rises that make it impossible to afford groceries and a social life and are destined to feel genuine insecurity in their housing.

We've been pushing for a long, long time—more than a quarter century—to get rid of those unfair property investor tax perks that have priced so many people out of their home, and we wanted to cap the grandfathering provisions to one investment property. That's been our policy for a long time. If the budget had actually done that, we would have an extra $33 billion on the table to build the public housing that we know we need. Baking in the advantage that's there for those who already got in on the housing investment gravy train means that we are failing to put the money that we need to and that we could have put into that public housing. Treasury's own numbers show that 54 per cent of the lost revenue from the CGT discount in 2022-23, which is around $13 billion, went to the richest one per cent of taxpayers. We've been advantaging the very wealthy at the cost of the very poor and the young.

This motion acknowledges the government's falling short of its own housing target, yet where do the Liberals stand on this question of building social housing? Where do they stand on the question of capping rents, and where do they stand on the essential policies we need to deal with homelessness across our country? The solutions on the table from the Liberal Party are to raid superannuation, for young people to reach into their savings which might give them a retirement income that gives them a decent standard of living, and to use it to get to their house. The other solution that's offered is to reduce the interest rate buffer and expose them to more risk in the housing market and more insecurity in their lives. The hypocrisy here is rank. We have a housing crisis. We need solutions. Neither party have them. (Time expired)