Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise to speak on this bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021. As the Deputy Speaker, Ms Bird, would know, I've been speaking on Treasury laws amendment bills for the last 17 years. They can really be quite interesting little bills. They are usually bills that address small things to do with other pieces of legislation or other things that governments have announced, and they all come together in these Treasury laws just to clean up little bits, usually—for example, in this one, whether payments to small businesses for emergency relief because of the bushfire and the drought are tax-deductible or whether they're counted as taxable income. So there are a number of schedules in this bill that just clean up small things like that.

I'm not actually going to talk about those today. I'm standing today because I want to talk about schedule 2—housing. Schedule 2 relates to the federal government's recently announced Family Home Guarantee measure. It was announced in the budget and it creates 10,000 new places for single parents with dependents. At first glance, when you hear that, you think: 'Wow! Ten thousand single parents getting into housing!' But, as with everything that this government announces, the announcement is more than the reality. So I want to have a look at the reality of this today.

But, first, I want to talk about Parramatta itself. If there were ever a place in Australia where we need to consider the housing needs of its residents, it's Parramatta. People arrive from around the world to settle in Parramatta. It's an incredibly diverse population, with a really flat bell curve. We're one of the 25 per cent highest income areas, but we have areas of considerable poverty as well. There are lots of tradies. There's lots of university education. It's a really interesting flat bell curve. If you don't get housing right for Parramatta, you don't get housing right for the country, because we contain, apart from rural Australia, everything else mixed together in Parramatta. We have safe Liberal wealthy areas to the north, quite poor safe Labor areas to the south, lots of working class, lots of educated, lots of public servants, a big health precinct. It's a really interesting population.

Our median house price crossed the million-dollar mark a number of years ago. It sits at $1.2 million now. Our median unit price in Parramatta is about $635,000. So we are in an area where living in Parramatta is not a possibility for many people who work in Parramatta. Firefighters, nurses, ambulance drivers, teachers—you name it—buying a home in Parramatta is out of reach for the vast majority of people who live there, and that's something that governments should be concerned about. That is something that governments should absolutely be concerned about, because every hour that people spend travelling is time that they don't spend with their families, and they are the genuinely non-productive hours. The hours spent sitting in your car or sitting in public transport travelling an hour or an hour and a half each way, sometimes two hours in Sydney, to work are useless hours. They do not contribute anything to a family or to a community or to the economy. They are useless hours, and we should be working hard to reduce them. Doing that requires that governments address the cost of housing in places where people work, but it seems that it's the other way at the moment, that where the housing prices are least affordable is where all the work is. It's a really interesting dilemma that we have in places like Parramatta, particularly as the workforce moves to becoming gig workers, with more flexibility in the working hours, which makes travelling to and from work even more difficult. Split shifts become impossible. Working at night becomes difficult, particularly for women, who may consider it a bit risky to travel two hours home at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night. Again, there are lots of things we need to consider, but housing is central to so much in our economy.

So what has the government done here? There are 10,000 new places for single parents. Let's start by saying it's 10,000 new places over four years, so it's 2½ thousand places per year for the next four years. That means 2½ thousand single parents who may be able to get assistance from the government and only pay a two per cent deposit on a house that they can buy. There are 151 electorates and 2½ thousand places, so I calculate that, if it is spread out evenly, it will be 16½ single parents in my electorate each year. It's one hell of an announcement, but when you break it down and say, 'What actually is it?' it's 16½ single parents per year for four years who may get assistance from this government to buy a house by contributing as little as a two per cent deposit—16½ people. There are 738 single parents in Parramatta. I calculate that even if no more single parents joined the queue—if we just started with 738 and there were no more—it would take 45 years to get to the end of it, even if no more people joined the queue. But I can tell you there are going to be more than 16½ single parents who join the queue next year. This is going to do nothing, really, for the group of people in my area who are struggling to buy a house. On numbers alone it's just laughable. It will be 16½ people per electorate each year for four years—64 people in total of 738. That's it: 10,000 nationwide out of a million single parents over four years. Numbers wise, it doesn't stack up. It's a great announcement, and for those 16 people—by the way, I'll be going out in my electorate and making sure that 16 people find this. I'll be making sure that we get our 16. But you really can't make a splashy announcement as if you're doing something extraordinary when that's the actual number you're talking about.

The second thing I want to talk about is not how many but who. Who will actually line up for this? The government says that as long as the household income is less than $125,000 you can apply for this. They capped the income at $125,000. That's fine. But the reality for single parents is actually much less than $125,000. In fact, the Melbourne institute shows the median income for a single income with one child is $54,000 after tax. That means that, of those one million Australians who are single parents, 500,000 of them earn less than $54,000 and 500,000 of them earn more than $54,000. Housing advocates have welcomed the change, but they indicated that the benefit will only really flow to single parents earning between $80,000 and $125,000 a year. So, again, the vast majority of parents, half of which earn less than $54,000, will not be able to access this scheme because they simply don't earn enough to pay for the housing that's available.

In my electorate, the median unit price is $625,000. But CoreLogic data for about 1,000 New South Wales suburbs shows that there's only one suburb in Western Sydney that a single parent on the median wage would actually be able to afford. Single parents with two children have a median income of $56,000 after tax, and that means they could borrow, according to Mortgage Choice, between $350,000 and $375,000 for a house. That doesn't even come halfway for a unit in Parramatta. There is one suburb in Western Sydney, Carramar, where the median price is under that $345,000. That is it.

So who are the lucky 16½ people in my electorate that might actually access this? They would be the people earning right up to that $125,000—and good; great for them, fantastic. I'll be really happy for the 16½ people. But I'm really distressed for the other 722 single parents in my electorate that are not assisted by this at all. The vast majority of them will never be able to afford to buy a house; they have to rent. Rents in Parramatta are also through the roof. The median rent is well over $450 a week. So, again, if the government genuinely wants to do something for housing for single parents—not the ones right up the top end but the vast majority of them, the 500,000 who earn less than $55,000 a year and the many, many more who earn between that $55,000 and $80,000—they need to get into social housing. They need to look at supplying housing and not doing what they're doing with every policy they have, which is driving demand, which pushes the prices up. It'll help 16½ people in my electorate buy a house, and it'll push the price up for everybody else. It'll push the price up for those that can't afford it. It will increase unaffordability of housing, not decrease it. They must get into social housing.

The only solution for so many people is renting. They need to be able to rent or be assisted into long-term rentals in places close to where they work, and the government do nothing for that. They push up house prices with everything they do. They help a small number of people use taxpayers' money to buy their own house, and they push the price up for everybody else. That's what this policy does.

Labor have a different approach altogether. We believe that, as well as assisting people to buy houses, you also need to assist people who are struggling to find permanent, long-term accommodation. That actually helps a family to thrive. The government talks a lot about hardworking Australians. I can tell you: a single parent with three kids is pretty hardworking. That doesn't mean they can get ahead and buy a house, because not everybody who works hard is rewarded with a large salary. In fact, most aren't. They work ridiculously hard. They work alongside lives that are sometimes unimaginable to some of us, but that doesn't mean they can get ahead. You have to start investing in the supply of housing in places where people work and make it possible for lower paid people in this country to thrive.

Imagine being a single parent on less than $55,000 a year—because that's the median; half of them earn under that—with insecure, irregular work; difficulty accessing child care because child care is not flexible enough; and every two or three years effectively having to move from where you live because the landlord sells or whatever. You've got your kids in school. You're trying to get to and from work, you're building relationships in the community, and you do not have a secure place to live during the period that your children are in school, and you have to move. I meet people like that every day. I meet people in that position every single day, because so much of the low-rental housing in Parramatta is owned by investors who buy properties for a period of time, rent them out, and then develop them. So renters don't get this long lease; they get short leases. They're in there for a while and then they have to move. And when they move they then they have the whole issue of how they get their children to school, where do they work, how do they get home—all of that. If they do have their kids in child care, they have to get them by 6 pm or pay the fine, even though they have to travel an hour and a half to get there. All of this stuff is only solved by housing.

That's why Labor has a $10 billion, off-budget housing future fund in mind, when in government, to build social and affordable housing now and in the future. To build 20,000 new social housing properties, including 4,000 homes for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and older women on low incomes who are at risk of homelessness, and to build 10,000 affordable homes for the heroes of the pandemic, the frontline workers like police, nurses and cleaners who kept us safe. That's a housing policy. That's a housing policy that will affect lives and affect them in large numbers. That's what you expect a government to do. You expect a government to look at the circumstances in which people live, to look at the circumstances—sometimes out of their control—and help those families to thrive.

This legislation doesn't do it. Well, for 16½ single parents in my electorate, maybe it does. Again, to the government, thank you for assisting 16½ people a year in my electorate—the 16½ single parents each year for the next four years who will be able to access the Family Home Guarantee. Thank you very much for that, but I would like you to come back and tell me what you're going to do for the other 722 in my electorate, most of whom earn considerably less than $80,000 a year and, by all of the research that's out there at the moment, simply would not be able to afford to buy anything at all within an hour or an hour and a half of where they currently are. One suburb—one suburb!—in Western Sydney, Carramar, is affordable to single parents on the median wage. So I'd really love the government to come in and tell me what they're going to do for the other 722 people. But, thank you very much. As a representative of the 16½ people in my electorate who might actually get housing because of this: thank you very much.

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