Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

This Labor government was elected and re-elected on the promise of housing affordability. It's been four years of Labor, and where are we? Housing is failing on three fronts at once: people can't afford to buy, renters can't afford to stay put, and too many people can't access secure housing at all. In 2024-25, an estimated 1.26 million low-income households were in housing stress, meaning they spent more than 30 per cent of their disposable income on housing. One in five renters are in rental stress, and the number of rough sleepers has increased by a third in two years. The social housing waitlist is getting longer and longer, and rents are staying at record-high levels.

Australians want this Labor government to get on with the job, to fix the housing crisis and to build public housing—housing that is guaranteed to be affordable for every Australian. Instead, Labor's Housing Australia Future Fund has invested more in the multitrillion dollar investment company BlackRock than it has in building affordable housing. In fact, most of the HAFF's top investments are in private equity, asset managers and the big banks, all of which rely on skyrocketing housing prices to keep up their immense profits. It's actually a joke that the fund that is meant to help fix the housing crisis relies on investing in companies that actually profit from it getting worse. It's circular, a housing policy that actually relies on not solving the problem.

It's been two years since that policy was implemented, and, as the Greens warned, it has been an embarrassing failure. We were promised 30,000 houses over five years, and we've barely gotten 1,000 in three. When will the Labor government admit that they were wrong? When will they admit that these convoluted schemes can't get around the simple fact that we actually need to build public housing? It seems that Labor can't do anything themselves. They can't tax the big corporations, so they need to invest in BlackRock to make their money. They can't build public housing, so they need to rely on the private market. What Labor needs to do is to get on with the job.

One of the best examples of Labor's inability to actually do anything themselves is the five per cent deposit scheme. Other governments have realised that they can actually build houses themselves, but Labor is so committed to this solution that all that they can imagine involves having massive debts incurred by first home buyers whilst the banks make massive profits off them. People are now having to make impossible choices, paying an unsustainable share of their income in rent or their mortgage, moving repeatedly, living in overcrowded housing, staying in unsafe situations or experiencing homelessness. We know that Labor's failures on housing are especially punishing renters, low-income households, young women, older women, First Nations people and people at risk of homelessness.

It's time to stop the useless bureaucracy and ineffective schemes and recognise that the solution to the housing crisis is building more affordable public housing and freezing the rent, not putting mortgage holders in more debt, not funnelling hundreds of million dollars to BlackRock, private equity and the banks. Build more public housing. Freeze the rent.