Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council Bill 2023 and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Housing Measures No. 1) Bill 2023 are some of the most important legislation that will come before this House this year. I'll go into why that is so in the course of my speech. For anyone listening, just to summarise what those three bills are about, this set of bills establishes a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to deliver more social and affordable housing; establishes the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council to provide independent expert advice to government on housing; and makes Housing Australia the home of Australian government housing programs. Housing Australia effectively takes over from the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation.

Last week the Property Council of Australia launched their paper A stark reality here at Parliament House. Their paper—which is more than just a paper; it's actually a book of some 50-odd pages—goes through the issues relating to why we effectively have a housing crisis in this country today. It's an important document that outlines a number of key statistics. I just want to go through some of those statistics and then come back to the substance of this legislation.

Firstly, the Australian population by the year 2060 is now projected to be 39 million people. It's expected to be something like 30 million by 2033. Of all the cities surveyed around the world, Sydney is now the second-least affordable city for housing in the world, out of some 92 cities that were surveyed. Five Australian capital cities—those being Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide—sat inside the worst 20 cities for affordability, and all Australian major city markets ranked as severely unaffordable. It goes on to say that homeownership rates in Australia have fallen from around 71 per cent in 1994-95 to 67 per cent in 2019-20. Importantly, the proportion of people who own their own homes but now have a mortgage has increased from 29 per cent in 1994-95 to 36.8 per cent in 2019-20. It's also expected that over the next seven or eight years there will be a housing shortfall of around 160,000 homes in this country. We also saw that only last year the national rental vacancy rate was down to as low as one per cent. Effectively, there was no vacancy rate because I'm sure, for that one per cent, there were good reasons why those houses were not rented.

The other point that is important to note with respect to that report is that we have in Australia today 418,000 social housing properties. Of those, 274,500 are provided by state and territory housing authorities. The important thing here is that those numbers have hardly moved over the last two or three decades, while the population of Australia has increased significantly. So, as the population has been going up, the number of social houses has remained pretty stagnant. Even worse—and this is a personal observation—over the last decade or so of the last coalition government we saw absolutely no commitment, no policy initiatives, towards addressing what was a problem 10 years ago and should have been picked up by the government. It is for that reason that, right now, we have the situation that we do. The reason is neglect over a 10-year period.

This legislation talks about what the Albanese Labor government is going to do to try and rectify those problems. I will come back to some specific comments a bit further on in my speech. But I just want to make some general points about the urgency of why we need a national housing plan and for this legislation to go through parliament.

Homelessness has been a real concern for this parliament and for governments ever since I came into this place. I can well recall one of the first issues that we were trying to address was homelessness, with over 100,000 people estimated at the time as being homeless. That was 15 years ago. I can recall the $6 billion fund the Rudd government at the time brought in to try to overcome some of that. Homelessness causes major social welfare problems and it adds to the social costs of government through health services and the like that have to be picked up further down the track.

We then have housing affordability. If people cannot afford their homes, then, quite frankly, it is one of the worst things that can happen for them. Not only is housing probably the biggest individual investment that any family will make but housing creates stability within families and within communities. A stable roof other a person's head, whether it's a rental roof or a roof on a home that they own, creates absolute stability, which in turn goes to health effects and so on which again are picked up by governments if housing is not available. That's not to mention the personal stress and grief that it causes families when they find themselves homeless or when they find themselves in a situation where they may become homeless. With respect to that, in the last 12 months alone, I have had more people come to my office seeking assistance for housing matters than I've ever had in previous years. Again, that just confirms the urgency of this matter.

There are many contributing factors as to why we are in the position we're in. I think the decade of neglect by the previous government is something that they will live to regret. Another issue—again an issue that I hold the previous government responsible for—was stagnant wages. When people's wages didn't go up, people couldn't afford to buy a home; in fact, some of them couldn't afford to rent either. Stagnant wages are a problem which this government, the Albanese government, understands and is doing something about.

Government investment in public housing, as I said earlier, has been diminishing over the years, rather than increasing. And we have responsibility for housing shared across all three levels of government: federal, state and local. It's not easy to pinpoint who is responsible, so each level of government passes the buck to another level. With respect to that, I applaud the Albanese government's initiative of a housing accord whereby all three levels of government are now expected to work together to try to overcome that very problem.

We also have a very cumbersome planning process across all jurisdictions. I've heard speakers from other states talking about that very issue, and I have my own experience from local government of how difficult the planning process can be for home builders and developers. We need to streamline that and do more to make it just that bit easier.

We then have—and, again, I think the Property Council of Australia highlights this point very well—a plethora of obligations, particularly from state and local governments, on anyone who wants to build a house. I could go through all the levies and taxes, the open space contributions and the other rates and taxes that have to be paid, not to mention the skills shortages that were mentioned by the previous speaker. When you combine all those factors you can understand why we have a housing shortage. I might say, with respect to skills shortages, that one of the other critical issues we face right now in this country is a shortage of certain key materials. Again, all these issues didn't just happen overnight; they happened gradually under the watch of the previous government, who did nothing about it.

Mr Deputy Speaker, in the last few minutes of my comments on this legislation I will say this: this is a $10 billion proposal that will go a long way to overcoming many of the problems I just spoke about. It may not fix them all but it will go a long way to addressing them. It is disappointing to hear that members opposite are likely to oppose this legislation. It is difficult to understand why. Quite frankly, the projects that will come from this legislation, if they're followed through, will go a long way to rebuilding our economy, creating jobs, creating skills and ensuring that as a nation we're in a much better place in years to come.

I will close by quoting some comments made by the Minister for Housing in her speech, on 8 February, at the launch of the Property Council of Australia's report A stark reality. I can't say it better than she did, so I'm going to quote from her speech. She said that initiatives under the Albanese government would include:

Agreeing to commission the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council to review barriers to institutional investment, finance and innovation in housing.

…   …   …   

Expanding and broadening the Home Guarantee Scheme, including delivering our Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee three months ahead of schedule which has already helped more than 1,700 Australians into home ownership.

Broadening the remit of the National Housing Infrastructure Facility to allow it to support new social and affordable housing, in addition to financing critical housing infrastructure such as roads, electricity and gas.

Establishing the Housing Policy Partnership, which comes under Priority Reform One of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

Announcing the development of the National Housing and Homelessness Plan—

and, importantly:

Establishing the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to support 30,000 new social and affordable dwellings in the first 5 years of the Fund's operation.

That's a comprehensive package of measures that the Albanese government is bringing to this parliament, to try and overcome the critical issue of housing shortages in this country and ensure that people have a future ahead of them where they will have a roof over their head. Again, I implore members opposite to support this initiative. It may not be everything they want, but it goes a long way to addressing the housing crisis that we currently face. I commend this legislation to the House.

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