Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is undeniable that homelessness is a growing problem in this country. On any given night, more than 105,000 Australians are homeless. That is one in every 200 people. According to the last census, 6,813 of these people were sleeping on the streets. Many thousands more were forced to couch surf, live in severely overcrowded housing or live in places like caravan parks or boarding houses that lack personal space and security. More than a quarter of our homeless population are children under the age of 18. On census night, almost 18,000 children under 12 were counted as homeless and 402 were sleeping rough.

The statistics belie some very horrific personal stories. Recently I was at a forum put on by the North Melbourne housing and homelessness action group where I met Spike, who had been living and sleeping rough through very long period of time and who is now spending his time advocating on the causes of homelessness. He explained that the health effects, just to take one aspect of it, are very significant. If you find yourself without a regular address, you find yourself less likely to come into regular contact with health services. If you do that, you are more likely to have problems such as dental problems. Spike explained that that in turn becomes a self-fulfilling circle: if you do not have teeth or you have bad teeth, you are less likely to get a job; if you are less likely to get a job, you are more likely to remain homeless.

There are other services in my electorate such as HomeGround. When I visited HomeGround, I came to understand the pressures that they were under. I met someone there who had been made redundant, who had been living on Newstart and who had then been homeless for a while. They found a home as a result of the work of HomeGround. That home, in the electorate of Melbourne, was one room in a rooming house in the suburb of Fitzroy and near to where this person had connections, and it set him back $180. When your Newstart payment is in the order of $240 and you are in a rooming house which you are sharing with others, you do not have the capacity to buy up in advance the right food and then cook it, because you are sharing fridges and sharing space with other people. So you end up eating bad food on the $60 a week that you have got left, or you skip it and eat nothing at all.

The need for affordable and appropriate accommodation is incredibly clear—and it has been clear for many years. Back in 2008, we had a very worthy pledge to halve homelessness. We had a white paper on homelessness. We were promised, amongst other things, a legislative response, for which we have been waiting some years. In that time, the pressure, certainly on services for people who deal with homelessness, has been increasing massively. We are at the point now where, on an average day in this country, 59 per cent of the people who are seeking to be newly accommodated by these services are turned away; the figure for couples with children is 74 per cent. The overwhelming reason for this situation is the lack of appropriate accommodation.

Let us think about that: on any given day, three quarters of the couples with children who find themselves homeless or who are at risk of homelessness and who front up to a service and ask for accommodation are turned away. In my office, we deal with a number of the consequences of that every day. In the electorate of Melbourne, there is more public housing than in any other electorate in the country, and the public housing waiting lists are huge. Even in public housing, there are people who are couch-surfing, who have been homeless for seven or eight years and who still have not been provided with appropriate accommodation. Not a day goes by when one of my staff members or I do not approach a housing service or a state government minister to seek appropriate accommodation for someone.

In the face of all those statistics and compelling stories, we have 250,000 Australian households on social housing waiting lists around the country, which is around half a million people. We have only 4,500 homeless people given priority access to public housing. There was a great deal of hope that finally the legislation, which was an overdue response to the white paper, might take us forward. Instead, we have a bill that expresses what are worthy sentiments but that is essentially a press release with a parliament of Australia bill cover on the front of it. The worthy sentiments do not bring with them one extra dollar for homeless services. This bill does not bring with it one new house or flat for someone who is seeking support. It will not relieve the pressure one jot on those who are homeless, who are at risk of homelessness or who are looking after those people who are at risk of homelessness. As one reads through the bill, yes, you find yourself nodding your head and agreeing with the very important and worthy sentiments in it. You keep waiting for the punchline where the bill will say that it is going to do something, and you turn to the last page and find that the bill says that not only is it not going to do something but something even more than that. It says in section 14:

(1) This Act does not, by its terms or operation, create or give rise to 4 any rights (whether substantive or procedural), or obligations, thatare legally enforceable in judicial or other proceedings.

It is a bill that is not legally binding. Why? What is the point of that if it is not backed up with a comprehensive response to the massive and growing problem of homelessness and housing affordability in this country? If you wanted a definition of Clayton's legislation, it is this—it is the bill you have when you are not having a bill—because it confers absolutely no legal rights or protections for this country's most vulnerable people and the ones who are most at risk.

Perhaps the reason we are seeing this bill brought on now at five minutes to midnight in this parliament is that last week was Homelessness Week and the Greens responded to that not with a bill that does nothing, but with a plan of action. The Greens have been concerned about homelessness and housing affordability for some time, and so last week we announced a homelessness action plan that would provide an emergency package to build 7,000 new homes by 2020—enough to house every person currently sleeping without adequate shelter. It is something that the government promised to do many years ago. We would include a 50 per cent target of fast-build, modular or pre-fabricated housing which will be significantly faster and more affordable to build. There are some great Australian factories that would be able to manufacture that modular and pre-fabricated housing. We would double the current funding for specialist homelessness services in Australia. In an environment where we know that, as I said before, 59 per cent of people are turned away on an average day when they turn up for help and three quarters of couples with children, we need that doubling in homelessness services.

We have had it costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office and it is eminently affordable, especially if we were to have the courage to raise the money this country needs to fund the services Australians expect. That would involve having a proper mining tax, and we hear today that Australia's banks are the most profitable in the world—and under Labor they have become the most profitable in the world—and the return to the community is nowhere near what it is in other countries. In other countries in Europe and the United States, they are saying, 'Well, look, we as governments stand behind you big banks and allow you to make these massive profits, we want a fair return.' A similar levy here in Australia would bring in $11 billion over four years. If we had the courage to stand up to the big miners or to the big banks or if we had the courage to just raise revenue in this country to the same proportion of GDP as it was under former Prime Minister John Howard, we would have an extra $20 billion to spend. That would mean that instead of having legislation that creates no legal rights or obligations and does not have one dollar attached to it, we could instead afford to fund initiatives like the Greens' proposal to solve Australia's homelessness by 2020. It would actually put some meat on the bones and put some money into building some housing and providing support for homelessness services.

If we are serious about addressing homelessness, I will tell you about two other things that would help. One is to raise NewStart above the poverty line. It has now been almost five years under this government where there has been a strong campaign from the sector and from people who say that we need to life NewStart above the poverty line, because it is far too low. We have had nothing but small increases that amount to only a couple of dollars a day. We need a minimum increase of $50 a week in NewStart—again it is something that is fully affordable if we had the courage to raise the revenue we need to fund the services Australians expect to create a more caring society. The second thing that I would do to address homelessness I would not kick single parents off their payments and put them on NewStart, because one of the most distressing things we have learnt is that since the start of this year is that housing services and welfare agencies are reporting a spike in the number of single parents with children who are seeking their services.

We told the parliament at the time the bill was going through—and people did not listen but it has been borne out to be the fact—that the people who were hit hardest by the government's decision to save a bit of money to help get back to surplus, a goal which they have now abandoned, were the ones who were already working. Kicking single parents off their welfare payments and onto the dole was apparently meant to help get them back into work but we learnt that the ones who were hit hardest were the ones who were already working the most because under the single parent payment you could earn and keep more of your income than you can under Newstart. Not only was it a drop in the actual payment but it was a drop in how much you could remain in the workforce. This was in face of the fact that single parents were already the group that had the highest proportion of people in work.

If you have met and spoken to single parents, you understand why. It is because they are predominantly women, many of whom have had experience of family violence and what they are trying to do is to provide the best life for their kids and for themselves as they possibly can. They are the group of people amongst all other welfare recipients who want to work and who are trying the hardest to juggle. They do not have spare cash to afford child care. They cannot necessarily have someone else at the end of a phone or in their house who can look after the kids and so they are juggling these things. Yet the decision that was made by the government has meant $140 a week in lost income for some of them. That is a lot of money when you are the only income earner in your family. As a result, more and more of them are presenting to services saying, 'We are now at risk of losing our house and we need the support of charity.'

If you were serious about addressing that, you would not be putting more people into a situation where they are at risk of homelessness by attacking those who are already doing it hardest. Let us get single parents back on the benefits and allow them to earn more and keep more of it as they used to be able to. Let us lift Newstart and the poverty line and let us have a debate in this country about how much we are prepared to raise the money to then fund these kinds of services because it is not that expensive—$233 million per annum to build prefabricated homes to house every rough sleeper by 2020. That is $500 million for the specialist homelessness services and signing a new national partnership on homelessness is $275 million. These are all eminently affordable and all costed. Let us do more than pass legislation that is not even legally binding. Let us make a real difference to Australia's homeless.

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