Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Housing Affordability) Bill and to support the amendment moved by the member for Barton. The cost of housing is making life hard for so many Australians—young people, low-income families and older women. According to a recent Grattan Institute report, house prices took off in the mid-1990s. Average house prices have increased from around two to three times the average disposable incomes in the eighties and early nineties to about five times the average disposable income more recently. This means median home prices have increased from four to five times the median incomes in the early 1990s to more than seven times the median income today. In Sydney, not far from my electorate on the New South Wales Central Coast, it's more than eight times the median income.

In a wealthy country like Australia, why are one-in-three single women over 60 living in poverty, many at risk of homelessness? Why is a young mother I met at her first appointment with a financial counsellor after leaving a violent relationship struggling to find $460 a week to keep her rental so her three children have a roof over their heads? Why is the grandmother I met in Bateau Bay, while on a surgery waiting list, housing her adult son in her garage because his partner died and he is no longer on the priority housing list? Why are some high-school students in my electorate living in refuges or struggling to get by in the private rental market while trying to finish high school?

If the government were serious about housing affordability and homelessness it would take action to address some of the causes of homelessness, particularly to improve the provision of services for mental health in the regions, to provide more support for women leaving family violence and to make sure that vulnerable Australians at risk of homelessness have safe, affordable housing. Why is it that a single-pensioner household faces spending up to 94 per cent of income on rent? This extreme level of housing stress is exacerbated by other pressures, such as increased healthcare costs, and must be urgently addressed.

I'll turn to the actual substance of the bill. What does this bill actually do to address homelessness? This bill imposes an Automatic Rent Deduction Scheme on social housing tenants and makes some changes to the administration of the National Rental Affordability Scheme. Labor referred this bill to a Senate inquiry to ensure it was given proper scrutiny. Labor has listened to the concerns raised by the housing and community sector. We know that the majority of social housing tenants manage their budgets and pay their rent on time. Evidence presented to the inquiry showed that 90 per cent of tenants meet their obligations. However, a form of automatic rent deduction may be appropriate to protect some social housing tenants who are genuinely facing a significant risk of homelessness in particular situations.

Labor will move amendments in the Senate to put safeguards in place to protect tenants and ensure that the scheme does not place them under financial hardship. At the moment, some social housing tenants who are also income support recipients can choose to have the Department of Human Services withhold a portion of their fortnightly payment and pay it directly to their housing provider to cover rent and some bills, like power bills. In this rent deduction scheme, participation is voluntary, and participants can leave the scheme whenever they choose. Around 86 per cent of the approximately 400,000 public and social housing tenants currently use the voluntary rent reduction scheme.

This bill would introduce an Automatic Rent Deduction Scheme. Under the Automatic Rent Deduction Scheme, everyone who receives an income support payment and/or family tax benefit and lives in either public housing or community housing could have part of their payment withheld by Centrelink and paid directly to the housing provider. Like the voluntary scheme, this amount could cover both rent and some bills, like power bills. It would be up to each state and territory to decide whether they wanted to be part of the automatic rent reduction scheme and, if so, how it would apply. Victoria and the ACT have said they will not participate in an automatic rent reduction scheme.

When Labor was in government, we introduced a Social Security Legislation Amendment (Public Housing Tenants' Support) Bill 2013, which would have introduced an automatic rent reduction scheme. We did this to act on a recommendation from the housing and homelessness white paper The road home. The Liberals opposed the bill. At the time, the shadow minister, the member for Menzies, claimed that it would increase housing stress and financial hardship. Yet they have now introduced a scheme that is much harsher than the one that Labor proposed. Let's look at some of the differences.

The changes in the public housing tenants' support bill would have only applied to tenants who were in rental arrears and at risk of homelessness, once other reasonable recovery action had been taken. The changes in this bill could potentially impact all tenants of public housing and community housing, including age pensioners, disability support pensioners and those with carer payments. Responsible people managing their own affairs and paying their rent for years could be caught up in these changes.

The amount deducted in the public housing tenants' support bill was able to be varied in accordance with changes in rental and utility amounts, provided the tenant was notified. This bill does not require that the tenant be notified of these changes. This bill allows for the deduction to include an amount to compensate landlords for property damage, which could be as a result of domestic and family violence. Labor's bill limited deductions to cover only an amount for rent and utilities, to protect people from being forced to pay for damage caused by others.

Labor has always said that most income support recipients are capable of managing their own finances. In fact, the rental collection rate for public and social housing in the five years to 2015-16 was over 99 per cent. Labor will move amendments in the Senate to ensure automatic deductions only occur when people are in arrears and at risk of homelessness. We will move an amendment to cap the maximum deduction to prevent the scheme forcing people into housing stress and to make sure people have money to meet other needs and pay other bills. Labor will move amendments to require that compulsory deductions can only be made for rent and utilities and not for property damage. As I mentioned earlier, this is to protect people from being held unfairly responsible for other people's actions.

The Labor amendments will also prevent deductions being taken from the discretionary portion of an income managed payment. Labor amendments would require social housing landlords to inform the tenant of any changes in the amount to be deducted from their payment. The amendments will also ensure that, if a tenant's payment is suspended, the accrued rent cannot be deducted when the payment resumes, potentially leaving people with nothing to live on.

Without significant changes to the Automatic Rent Deduction Scheme, Labor will not be able to support this part of the bill in the Senate. Labor has concerns about the interactions of the Automatic Rent Deduction Scheme with deductions being made from income support payments through Centrepay, particularly payments for household goods under consumer leases with businesses such as Radio Rentals. Consumer leases cost low-income earners up to eight times the retail price of consumer goods. The Senate passed a Labor private senator's bill in the 44th parliament to exclude consumer leases as an eligible service reason for the purposes of Centrepay third-party payment system. While Centrepay is closed to payday lenders, it remains open to consumer leasing businesses which continue to inflict financial hardship on low-income earners. Consumer leases are just as damaging to vulnerable low-income earners as payday loans. Labor therefore remains committed to excluding consumer leasing as an eligible service reason for Centrepay.

Before touching on the National Rental Affordability Scheme, I want to refer back to my community. In this recent report, regional New South Wales remains the least affordable regional area studied in Australia in terms of the rental affordability index, with households facing rents of sometimes upwards of 27 per cent of income. Let me reiterate that rental arrears are not the main cause of social housing evictions and that homelessness in Australia cannot be addressed without addressing issues of mental health, domestic and family violence and lack of affordable housing. A Shorten Labor government will take a whole-of-government approach to the issue of homelessness, to ensure that all causes of homelessness, housing insecurity and housing stress are addressed, not just the rental arrears of a small number of social housing tenants.

The National Rental Affordability Scheme is a Labor program, and Labor will not oppose changes to the scheme that help the achievement of the scheme's objective of increasing and maintaining the supply of affordable rental dwellings and reduced rental costs for low- and moderate-income households. What is of concern is the capping of this scheme by this government.

Labor's original scheme provided for 50,000 new, affordable rental dwellings to be built. Given the strong interest in the scheme, Labor undertook to extend the scheme by a further 35,000 dwellings, to provide a total of 85,000 dwellings. But in the 2014-15 budget the Abbott government announced that the NRAS would be capped at 38,000 dwellings. That decision has been widely criticised by housing sector stakeholders, including the Property Council of Australia, the Housing Industry Association, the Urban Development Institute, Homelessness Australia, National Shelter, Mission Australia, ACOSS, the Federation of Community Housing Associations, Anglicare, the St Vincent de Paul Society and many others. This short-sighted decision, along with the government's failure to bridge the funding gap, has severely curtailed the supply of affordable rental housing. As I mentioned earlier, in regional New South Wales, where my electorate of Dobell is situated, upwards of a third of households are in extreme housing stress, according to the Rental Affordability Index.

Housing policy experts are unanimous that bridging the funding gap is essential to improving housing affordability and securing better housing options for all Australians. Labor will support changes to the NRAS that will encourage approved participants to retain their dwelling in the scheme, which will minimise the loss of dwellings to the scheme. While we support changes contained in the bill to ensure rents for NRAS dwellings are at all times at least 20 per cent below the market rent valuation for the dwellings, Labor believe there needs to be additional flexibility to allow unintentional rent overcharges to be refunded or credited to a tenant in a timely manner. The alternative is for approved participants and investors to face penalties in the form of reduced incentive payments for unintended minor technical breaches of the rental charge provisions which could easily be remedied by a timely refund or credit to the tenant.

Labor therefore welcomes the proposed amendments by the government following the Senate inquiry. The amendments are consistent with recommendations in Labor senators' dissenting report. They include an amendment that will permit the National Rental Affordability Scheme Regulations 2008 to include a power for the Secretary of the Department of Social Services to grant dispensation from the 20-per-cent-at-all-times rule to approved participants where there has been an unintentional overcharging of rent and the tenant has been compensated for the error.

In concluding, I would like to turn once again to my community on the New South Wales Central Coast, which is like many other communities in regional Australia. In my community there is acute housing stress, which is exacerbated by other pressures, including increased healthcare costs and transport. It is of extreme concern to me for communities like mine across Australia. I refer to my time working in mental health units at Wyong Hospital, the public hospital in the community in my electorate of Dobell. I worked in those mental health units for almost 10 years. It was particularly distressing when someone was well and ready to make the transition back into the community. Sometimes the decision of multidisciplinary teams would be that, yes, they would be accepted into a community mental health team, but those community teams were stretched. There wasn't capacity within the teams to be able to meet properly the needs of these people who had faced mental health problems and a mental health crisis and were now moving back into the community.

One of those particular stressors was housing. I recall coming out of a team meeting and a patient review. The social worker gave a phone book to a patient who was about to be discharged and said, 'You now have to find yourself a place to live.' In a competitive rental market in a regional community, how is somebody who is being discharged from a mental health unit in a public hospital meant to secure themselves a place to live, with a phone book and a public phone? This bill is not addressing the cause. It is not looking at how people find themselves homeless and at the things that government can and should do, and this should be done urgently.

There shouldn't be a situation in a wealthy country like Australia where one in four single women over 60 are finding themselves in poverty and at risk of homelessness. There shouldn't be the situation in Australia today where a person being discharged from a mental health unit is given a phone book and told to use a phone on the ward to try to find themselves a place to live. In a wealthy country like Australia, there should be provisions, safety nets and safeguards such that no vulnerable person finds themselves in this extreme housing stress or at risk of homelessness.

I call on the government to urgently act on this and to look at the cause, to look at where housing and homelessness problems stem from and the crisis that exists in Australia today, particularly in regional and remote Australia. The government must act. The government needs to act urgently to properly address this housing and homelessness crisis in Australia today.

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