Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the crossbench for bringing forward this matter of public importance today, because I believe every member of this chamber would agree that housing affordability is absolutely a matter of public importance in all of our electorates across this country at the moment.

I'd also like to thank Minister Collins for her speech and her commitment, in all the work she is doing at the moment, to addressing housing affordability, as well as for sharing her own story and firsthand experience of understanding exactly why this is so important. I thank her for her work to get the government's national housing and homelessness plan off the ground. She has already held two meetings with state and territory housing ministers to help deliver our reform agenda, and I would encourage all who are speaking today to contribute to that process.

I want to start my contribution by briefly talking about a constituent of mine, Nick, who is a bright young man I first encountered last year during the Raise our Voice Youth Voice in Parliament competition. Nick, who was 18 at the time and experiencing homelessness, wrote me an incredibly powerful speech, which was the speech I chose to deliver in the 46th Parliament. In his speech he said:

The pathway to end homelessness won't be easy. It will involve more funding, more NGOs, more youth workers and overall more care for the tens of thousands of young Australians each and every night that face homelessness. But I truly believe that with these steps, and more, in 20 years no-one else like me will ever have to wonder: where will I sleep tonight?

Nick made some really important points in that speech. We know that fixing the housing affordability crisis and getting people into secure housing is going to be difficult. We need to have the ambition, as Nick does, that we can make that happen, because affordable housing is central to the security and dignity of all Australians, as the minister has said.

In my electorate of Canberra we have high median incomes and relatively low unemployment. We also have the highest rents in the country. It's this reality that makes our city a particularly difficult place to be on a low income. I have met again with Nick since the election, and, devastatingly, he is still experiencing insecure housing. He said to me that, in spite of working and studying and doing everything right, as he put it, he still cannot get the housing piece into place for himself. We all need to do much better to address that.

The reality is that in Australia we are in the middle of a housing crisis. It's tough to buy a home, tougher than ever before. Research by the Grattan Institute found that 40 years ago almost 60 per cent of young Australians on low and modest incomes owned their own home but, sadly, now it is only 28 per cent.

I'm really proud that housing was a central part of the agenda that Labor took to the election and that, as a government, we are already doing important work to address this national crisis. One of the most important parts of that agenda is the national plan for housing and homelessness. Fixing our nation's housing issues requires all tiers of government to work together towards a commonly agreed objective of providing shelter for all Australians. As I mentioned earlier, housing ministers from the states and territories have already started meeting to coordinate our efforts to deliver these reforms and work together on a new national housing and homelessness plan. This plan will set and deliver short-, medium- and long-term goals to improve housing outcomes across Australia. It will be developed with the support and assistance of key stakeholders.

The Housing Australia Future Fund was also one of Labor's key commitments. The $10 billion of this fund will help end a decade of underinvestment and neglect. It will help ease pressure on people right across the country who are trying to find somewhere to call home. It will build 30,000 new affordable and social housing properties in its first five years, and states and territories have committed to building around 15,000 properties in addition to those. This will include 20,000 social housing properties, 4,000 of which will be allocated for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and for older women on low incomes who are at risk of homelessness. We also have the Help to Buy program and our Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee, which, as Minister Collins has said, we have brought forward. I'm nearly out of time, but I want to also mention federal Labor's commitment to Canberra's Youth Foyer, which will help assist young people in Canberra experiencing homelessness.

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