Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Housing affordability is one of the critical challenges facing this parliament. The government has appointed a Minister for Housing and plans to legislate a Housing Australia Future Fund. Their policy is to build 30,000 new homes, mostly social housing, over the next five years. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but let's be honest: this is absolutely a drop in the ocean compared to the fundamental shift in housing that we need in this country if we are fundamentally going to address housing affordability for everyone.

Australia has 400 homes per 1,000 people of our population. That puts us among the lowest in the OECD. We would need two million more homes in this country to reach the OECD average of home supply in the world. We've talked about 30,000 more social housing homes, and I applaud that, but we have 163,000 people on the social housing waitlist. We need to address this at all levels of government and at all levels of society.

Let's look at the consequences that this is building in our community. I come from Wentworth, and in Wentworth this is an issue that is raised with me constantly. People are concerned for their children. I have many people who have built wealth and happiness having a house, but they do not believe that their children will have the ability to do that. I hear deep concern from my schools and my health communities about how nurses and teachers cannot live in our community because of housing affordability.

I went recently to Friendship Circle's Friendship Walk, which brings people who have children with disabilities together with other families around the community. During that walk, I spoke to so many parents who said their children are going to need to have housing as adults, independent housing for people with disabilities, and there is absolutely no chance of that being built in the community of Wentworth. I applaud those parents for their concern. Because of housing affordability, there is no chance that they're going to be able to live near their children when they move into independent care.

I'm talking about this in compassionate terms, and these are compassionate issues, but this is actually absolutely an economic issue. This is an issue that goes to the heart of our productivity as a nation. The consequences of a dysfunctional housing market are much more deep and more damaging to the economy than so many realise, and many of the problems that our society faces are because of worse housing affordability. It pushes people away from where they want to live into where they can afford to live. It imposes huge costs in terms of billions of dollars building roads and public transport systems to move people around, and this also generates pollution. It is detrimental to our overall productivity, because our housing structures mean that people do not change their modes of housing and we do not have the right sort of housing to meet the needs of our community. Even with those who are trying to build a business, for example, if they're trying to turn their business plan into reality, they realise that commercial and industrial space costs can also be prohibitive. It's not just housing costs that are important; it's our broader cost of living and the cost of commercial property.

Fixing housing, as we have talked about tonight, will take a lot of changes, big and small, but the heart of this is supply. We need to build more homes. We need to build them in the CBDs and inner cities where so many people want to live. We need to build them close to active public transport options. Supply won't solve every problem—we need more action on social housing and we need rental assistance—but supply is absolutely crucial to this solution. I will say again that if we were making the OECD average in terms of the supply of housing per 1,000 people we would have almost two million more homes in this country. There is not a single part of this government or previous governments that has really dealt with this as an issue.

Housing is primarily a responsibility of state and local governments, but this is a national problem, and the Commonwealth must take a lead on this. The Labor Party is in government in many, many states in this country. This is the opportunity for the government to take real leadership and truly make a difference here. I think that we need to pull every lever we can on housing, but we absolutely need to focus on supply if the idea of having a house in Australia is not going to become a dream for past generations.

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