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

We do not have a charter of rights. The member opposite says that's not true. I'd like him to point me to the federal charter of rights. We are signed up to international conventions that say housing is a human right. We do not have a federal bill of rights in this country which people can rely on in order to make their government provide housing as a human right. Other jurisdictions around the world do this but Australia doesn't.

There are many things that we need to fix in this country so that people like Lisa and her sons can have security now and so Lisa can have security in retirement. Raiding her superannuation, as Lisa said to me, is not one of the responses. In Lisa's own words, that will leave her retiring without enough to live on. There are structural things that we need to do. We need to invest in social housing and we need to treat housing in this country as a basic human right. It's part of the reason why in my first speech and at every opportunity I have pushed for the need to have a charter of human rights at the federal level in this country so that rights and responsibilities are more than just words; they are things that governments have to uphold.

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