Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You weren't talking about real people. This is a speech about people from my community. This is a speech about Lisa from Langwarrin, who emailed me. I've spoken to her. She's 49 years old. She's a single mother of three. Her youngest son is 14. Lisa has two jobs. She works full-time for the council and she works between 10 and 20 hours a week as a disability support worker. A divorce bled her savings dry. By the time the divorce was over, she had no savings and the house that she'd bought in 2003 was gone. Her husband owes her tens of thousands of dollars in child support but they can't obtain it because he's self-employed and his tax returns say he doesn't earn enough money. She has to pay $2,000 a month in rent to have a home near her son's school in Langwarrin that's decent enough that she feels she can be proud enough to bring them up in it.

She has said to me that she's at the mercy of her landlord all the time. The landlord can change their mind and say they don't want to continue the lease. And she's at the mercy of her job continuing. If something happens with her job, she is one month away from being homeless. The only safety net she has is her long service leave. She cannot save enough money for a mortgage. She cannot buy a house. That's what she wants for herself, for her retirement, and for her sons and her family. That's what my speech is about: Lisa from Langwarrin and all the other Lisas out there, who are hardworking, decent people who cannot afford to live decently in this country at the moment because of the cost of housing and the cost of rent.

My friend and colleague the member for Macnamara recently published a report with McKell called The crumbling Australian dream. One of the things he talked about in that report which is fundamentally important is that we don't consider housing a human right in this country.

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