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

People all over the country, young people in particular, are being screwed over by the government, and my constituents in Melbourne are no exception. Whether it is complete inaction on climate change—if you listen to the Treasurer's speech last night, you would be forgiven for thinking that climate change does not exist: it did not rate a mention once—the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else or the fact that young people are being done over day by day by day, the list is endless. The government showed us with their budget last night that they will back, every time, the people who own a home already to get their second, third or fourth, even at the cost of billions of dollars for the budget, while making it harder and harder for young people to buy their first house.

Since I was elected, nearly 3,000 individual constituents have come through my office seeking help about a range of matters, often dealing with problems caused by the failure of this government. That is on top of the many, many more who have contacted me with their views about a variety of issues and, of course, the hundreds of community groups in the electorate, with whom we deal on a regular basis. But today I want to talk about a few of the failures in our system and how they are affecting people in my electorate of Melbourne, in particular.

Housing is out of control. In 1985, a home in Melbourne cost three times the average wage—now it is 9.7 times the average wage. The Domain Group chief economist has predicted that Melbourne's median house price will reach $1 million by the end of next year. When you look at how it has changed for young people over time, you see that it used to be, a couple of decades ago, that an average house cost six times young person's income—that was back in the 1990s—now it is 12 times an average young person's income. But when the government had the chance to do something about it by tackling unfair tax breaks it squibbed it. The government has said in this budget that it will make students pay more, by loading them up with HECS debt and making them pay it back earlier, and it will cut the funding to universities, so the education the students get is going to be delivered by universities with even less money to deliver it, but it is happy to spend billions of dollars every year to subsidise people who have already got a home to buy their second, third or fourth home and have a tax break to put in their pocket. That is manifestly unfair. The budget was a chance to fix that and take some real action to make housing affordable and put it within reach of young people, and the government has completely squibbed it.

Meanwhile, the government is persisting in saying that it has to give tax cuts to big business. Its priorities are completely wrong. If you are a young person under 35, the only thing that you got from last night's budget was the middle finger. The government had a chance to help address the growing generational gap in this country, and it chose to side with those who already have a lot of money and who already have a lot of wealth—and the war on the young is continuing.

Even as costs soar in the private housing market, for decades governments of both stripes have failed to invest in public housing in the way that we need. Over 33,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing in Victoria. When you look at the waiting lists over the last few years, it is common for people who are homeless to have to wait three, four or five years to find a home—this is people who are homeless. This week, my office spoke with Hawa, who is a sole parent with young children and has been homeless for over 15 months. She and her kids have been left waiting on the highest level of priority for public housing for over a year without even stable transitional accommodation. Imagine: how can you do all the things that a parent wants to do, like get the kids to school and back home again, if you do not know where you are going to sleep that night. Hawa is just one of hundreds of people in my electorate who have sought my assistance, because housing has failed them.

With this crisis in affordable housing, the number of people who are homeless is shooting up. More than twice as many people are sleeping rough in Melbourne as in 2012. Faced with this crisis you would think that governments would be doing everything they can to be building more public housing. But, instead, the Victorian Labor government, which we thought might be better than the Liberals, is selling off public housing land to private development. My constituents in Ascot Vale, Flemington and parts of North Melbourne are facing the prospect of Labor moving them out of their homes and breaking up existing communities, and if they choose to come back to their previous estates most of the open space is going to be taken up not with new public housing but with private housing.

The small increase in the amount of social housing is going to go nowhere near what is needed to address the looming crisis. When you have prime land in inner-city Melbourne that has public housing on it, let's take the opportunity to build more public housing there. But, instead, the government is saying that they are going to sell it off to private developers because it makes them a bit of cash. We are going to fight that tooth and nail, because building more public housing is one of the best ways that we can deal with the housing affordability crisis in this country.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, our lord mayor, Robert Doyle, has come up with the worst possible idea, which is to ban homelessness. Well, passing a law against it is not going to make it go away. In the 19th century, Nobel Prize winner Anatole France said:

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, that was a warning—it was not a 'how to' guide. It was not a suggestion that you actually pass a law banning people who are homeless from sleeping in some of the few places they might be able to.

A quorum having been called for in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:57 to 11:58

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, our lord mayor, Robert Doyle, has come up with the worst possible idea for dealing with the housing crisis, which is to pass a law to ban homelessness. In the 19th century Nobel Prize winner Anatole France said:

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

That was a warning about justice. It was not a 'how-to' guide for a local council. It was not a 'how-to' guide, Robert Doyle. It was not suggesting that we somehow need to deal with this problem by saying that people who are doing it so tough that the only place they can find to sleep is somewhere where most of us would never want to spend an hour, let alone at night, passing a law saying you cannot do it any more and we are going to fine you and potentially have you committing a criminal offence. So let us get serious in Melbourne about investing in affordable housing, not just blame the people who are homeless for the failure of our housing system.

The Greens are standing up to the homelessness ban by Melbourne City Council. I acknowledge all of those who have campaigned against the ban, including many people who have experienced homelessness and who know what it will mean for people who are sleeping rough. We have a housing crisis and we will fix it by government deciding to build more public housing and by the federal government deciding to stop spending billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on helping people who already have a home to get their second, third or fourth and instead put it into building more affordable housing.

Melbourne is the place it is today because of the contribution of migrants and refugees. I cannot imagine Melbourne without the Vietnamese community or without the Greek and Italian communities, all of whom settled in Richmond and then moved to other suburbs like Carlton. There are the African communities in my neighbourhood of Flemington and other parts of the electorate and there are the Chinese communities that you see in various parts including in Chinatown, and there are so many others. Melbourne is a place where we show that there is an alternative to the hate and fear of the likes of Senator Pauline Hanson. When the federal government takes its lead from the far Right and attacks the success of Australian multiculturalism, people in my electorate feel the pain.

I have met constituents who have told me they have already faced racist insults in the street. One woman told me that her hijab was ripped off her head. A 12-year-old at Carlton Primary School wrote to me to say that, during the middle of her 800-metre race at school, someone called out an insult to her suggesting that she was a terrorist because she had a hijab on. She was so upset that she could not finish her race. This is what is at stake—the right of kids to be able to go about their daily lives and do something that everyone would expect you would have the right to do, like participate in a sports carnival, without being insulted or assaulted because of who you are. But we have got a cultural and immigration system that is punishing people, not supporting them. Families are being separated because it is getting harder and harder to bring family members to Australia to spend time with loved ones. Melburnians trying to bring their partners to Australia are being told to expect a waiting time of over 23 months before their partner can join them. That is two years before couples can get on with their lives together. Not that long ago it was less than 12 months, which is still very long time. This federal government is failing families. People applying to bring in family members located in East Africa are waiting for a longer time than those applying to bring in family members from, for example, Europe or North America. I have heard of constituents who have followed the rules and done everything correctly but have had to wait over a year longer than the guidelines say because it took over a year for basic police checks to be done by the Australian government. They were told they were not allowed to access any information or even ask about what was happening to their applications. It is not good enough. It is systemic discrimination and it is hitting people who come from countries like those in Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa and East Africa, the hardest.

We have also heard from a constituent who has a son who is in danger, who was bashed by the police. He is living in Sudan and has no direct family there nor anywhere else in the world other than Australia. The family have been waiting since May 2011 for their last remaining relative visa to be finalised. Someone who has no family anywhere else in the world other than in Australia has been waiting since May 2011 just to have a visa finalised. Just yesterday my office spoke with a woman whose brother is a refugee who was forced to leave his country and is now in a camp. The department of immigration told her that they acknowledged he was in danger, he had faced persecution and he had nowhere to go but Australia. Yet, because the coalition government had cut the number of refugee places by a third, his request to join his family and live safely in Australia has been refused.

This government talks all the time about how we have to so-called stop the boats because we have to look after the people who are waiting in the so-called queues. Well, let me tell you—and the parliament needs to understand—there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world who are desperately waiting in camps, and their family members here are trying to get them out. They are waiting and doing the right thing, and they are being shown a closed door by this government.

The government's recent announcement that it plans to change citizenship rules and leave people waiting for more than two years has left many Melbourne residents and their families facing deep uncertainty. My office has spoken with people who have tried to do the right thing and want to contribute to Australia as their new country but at the last minute have had their entire plans ripped out from under them. These changes have real impacts on real people. Often the people in this situation have no access to support or legal advice, and with chronic underfunding from government for community legal centres, which they were dragged kicking and screaming to partly repair, still so many people who just want to come to Australia and make this place their home do not have access to the support that they need to even get their application processed and to deal with the fact that the government is putting otherwise good applications on hold.

Meanwhile, the government's cruelty to refugees continues. This government has sent Vietnamese and Tamil asylum seekers back to danger without even processing their refugee claims. Recently in the House I spoke about Saeed, which is not his real name. He is currently in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, threatened with deportation. He is a stateless man from a religious minority, who faced persecution in Iraq, to where the Australian government wants to forcibly return him. He fears for his life if he is sent there. Mr Peter Dutton has the power to stop his deportation, and I stand with Saeed and the people protesting around the country, including in my electorate, who are trying to make sure this deportation does not happen. It is worth remembering that, if 40 years ago governments had the same policy of turning people back that the Liberal and Labor parties have today, there would not be a Vietnamese community in Melbourne. Pausing and reflecting on that single fact alone ought to make people realise that our current approach to dealing with refugees who are coming here seeking our help is fundamentally wrong, and those people who did not stand up and demand a better system are going to be judged very harshly.

For years the Greens have pushed for a better deal for people receiving Centrelink payments, including an increase to Newstart and to youth allowance, but Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National coalition are instead punishing and making life hard for too many people in Melbourne and in Australia. This comes on the back of cuts from previous Labor governments, including cuts to sole parenting payments. Now the punitive measures are continuing in this year's budget. If you are on social support, the government wants to treat you like someone who is a potential criminal all the time. We need a supportive approach to people that are seeking support from our safety net, rather than a punitive approach. It is replacing one punitive approach with another, when we know that does not work. You cannot blame people for not finding jobs that are not there. One thing that government did not tell you in their speech last night is that buried in the back of the budget are forecasts that unemployment will continue to rise. That is going to hit young people the hardest. We know that since the GFC the youth unemployment rate has not come back to parity with the general unemployment rate, and young people are finding it increasingly hard to find a decent full-time job that allows them to meet the ever rising cost of housing and to deal with the debts that, thanks to this government, they are increasingly accruing. The jobs are just not there.

So what do you do? Do you turn around and say, 'Let's put in place programs, like investing in education and building more renewable energy, that might actually employ some of those people'? Or do you turn around and blame the victim, which is what the government has done in this budget? To say, 'Just because you have no job, through no fault of your own, we are going to subject you to invasions of your personal liberty and demand that you submit to regular drug testing,' is vilifying people. If this government starts breath-testing its own MPs and cabinet ministers before they come in for every speech or every vote then the Australian population might start to take them seriously, but everyone can see what they are doing for what it is: an attack on the poor and the jobless, when the government should be trying to create jobs for those people, rather than blaming them.

Let's not forget the robo-debt debacle. My office has been inundated with calls from people who have been issued automated debt notices by Centrelink, and I am aware of many cases where the debt was totally wrong. One couple was issued with a debt notice for over $25,000, and when it was investigated it turned out there was no debt at all. Imagine receiving a letter from a government department telling you you have to pay $25,000 and the full force of the law applies, and it turns out there is no debt at all! This couple was fortunate enough to know that there was someone they could turn to for help—their local MP, who was not in the government—but so many people will not be in that situation. They will receive these notices and not know what to do. It will be terrifying and it will have a huge impact. Think about what that means. Imagine getting that letter from the government. You might think that at least you would get an apology from the government, but no. This government has refused to apologise at all. It has simply said, 'The system wasn't working as intended.'

Another constituent was issued with a debt notice, then told the debt was no longer current, but then, months later, was sent another letter asking how he was going to repay the debt. It was only after further inquiries from my office that he was finally told that really there was no debt.

What we are finding is that the government is saying to people: 'You have a debt to pay. You've got to pay it. If you think that debt isn't right, effectively the onus is on you to come and prove to us that there is no debt.' It is like getting a phone call from a debt collection agency to say: 'We've got a suggestion here that back in 2005 you borrowed Flying High from the video store and you haven't returned it. The fines have accumulated and we'd like you to pay them back. If you can prove that you didn't borrow that video then we'll waive them, but if you can't prove it then, sorry, you have to pay up.' This is ridiculous. It is reversing the onus of proof and it is government continuing with the approach of treating everyone who is without a job as a criminal.

You do not treat people who have fallen on hard times as criminals. If you want Australia to be a place where everyone is looked after and everyone feels that they have got a place, you provide support for people. You put in place programs that create jobs and you lift the level of Newstart above the poverty line. It is far too low and it is stopping people from getting access to the jobs that they need. They do not have the money to go and get that haircut or buy those extra clothes that might help them at a job interview. There are so many people applying, and the jobs are not even there. The government has to stop punishing the victim.

Debate adjourned.

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