Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. This government has fought, since the last budget was delivered, for a $65 billion corporate tax cut for millions of multinational businesses that absolutely do not need it. They will not provide any assurances on this private member's motion that's been moved by my colleague the hardworking member for Barton, Linda Burney, on what we actually need in this country, which is housing for our first-nations people.

Every single one of us has the right to a stable house, to a house where health and safety are an absolute priority. You cannot walk into this place and say that you support Indigenous communities or you support the reduction of family violence when—imagine for one second—three or four people are living in one bedroom, or 15 people are living in one three-bedroom house with one toilet, which is the current case for many of our first-nations people in remote and discrete communities right around this country. Proper, affordable and well-maintained housing is a right. It is not a privilege; it is an absolute right; otherwise, what are we doing as a country?

It seems that we are about to witness another failure by this government with public hand-wringing and placing the issue vital to all Australians in the far-too-hard basket. Linda Burney, the member for Barton, has rightfully highlighted the gross inequality and hypocrisy that are on full display here. We need to discuss a problem that has affected countless lives, fostered resentment, fostered increased drug and alcohol abuse and torn families apart.

The National Partnership on Remote Housing is an agreement that has the potential to give Indigenous people in remote and discrete communities a chance to improve and take control of their own lives, something that everybody welcomes and something that I think, by and large, everybody supports. But, if you've got a program that's about to expire on 30 June and no promises or forecasts in the budget estimates to say that you're going to keep funding it, what kind of insecure tenure are these people on? What kind of agreement have you actually made? You've made no agreement. You've made no promises to do anything different. You are simply stringing it out and hoping that no-one's going to notice while the states and territories fight it out with the Commonwealth. This needs to be something that we all agree to, something that we do moving forward, not keeping these people living in limbo. The partnership needs to reflect local cultural factors and sensitivities. We're yet to hear from the government whether the agreement will be extended. What we see in this area right now is confusion and differences between all of the agencies.

The Turnbull government's own housing review—a review they released just before Christmas last year—said that there's already a shortfall of 5½ thousand homes in the national partnership agreement, although some have the figures as high as 36,000 short. The New South Wales Aboriginal Housing Office says that the current undersupply of Aboriginal housing stands at 36,025 dwellings. I'm not holding my breath for a New South Wales Liberal government to prioritise Aboriginal housing over their $2.7 billion stadium rebuild, which is a disgrace. The review predicts that this undersupply will increase to about 90,000 in 2031 if we sit on our hands and do nothing. It might be convenient for this government to flash around $65 billion in corporate tax cuts, but if we leave this festering as the sore that it is it's only going to get worse. In the Northern Territory, with a population of about 200,000 people, media reports have estimated the need for about 2,000 to 5,000 properties, and the state of the existing stock does not a pretty picture make.

Today we welcomed women from the Tangentyere Women's Family Safety Group, which is a group of town camp women who live in Alice Springs and all kinds of town camp arrangements. They are from all the town camps, and they are represented in big numbers. They came here today to talk to us about domestic violence affecting their communities. We know that Aboriginal women are 32 times as likely as non-Aboriginal women to experience violence. If we have nowhere to take these women after crisis and if we have no transitional homes—there is already a shortage of homes for people who are not escaping domestic violence—where do these women go? They go to the local refuge. The local refuge can offer a woman escaping family violence three nights and, on that refuge's own admission, those women can be exited into homelessness. That is not a solution. That is not a fix. That is not doing anyone any favours, and it is certainly not helping women out of a dangerous situation.

It is an absolute disgrace that this government has not committed this funding, and I would ask that Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister, and Minister Scullion take immediate steps to ensure the continuation of funding for remote and Indigenous housing. Failure to do so will be another example of a government that is too out of touch—and I'm not sure that they ever had the touch, to be quite frank—and concerned only with their internal disputes rather than the living arrangements of people in remote Indigenous communities. In those houses, where there's overcrowding, health becomes an issue. I know as a mum with four people living in the house that if you get an outbreak of gastroenteritis in the house and you don't sanitise everything and wash it down then everyone's sick. So, this is urgent, and I urge the government to act immediately.

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