Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank my colleague and neighbour, the member for Kooyong, for raising this important motion. Like her, I have very many young Australians struggling to find a home. I have a great many young adults still living with their parents. I have people who are now living in cars in council car parks, and is this happening in Higgins, which should give you an indication as to how bad it is elsewhere. It's not as if they don't have a job. They do have jobs. It's just that they can't make rent. We have too many Australians right around the country who are spinning their wheels in this purgatory of insecure housing. We're even seeing the emergence of tent cities in some parts of our country, which is an absolute indictment and should not be happening in a country that is one of the wealthiest in the world. In the OECD, we are the 11th-wealthiest country when it comes to a average income. There's no shortage of money in this country.

When it comes to housing, Australian dwellings peaked in 2016 and have been in decline ever since. When you compare us to the OECD, which is a club of mostly rich countries, we have below-average rates of social and affordable housing. What added to this, of course, was this major shock, the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, rental vacancies were sitting in the healthy three-to-four per cent range. After the pandemic, they plummeted to one per cent or less. In the last few months, we've seen an increase in rental vacancies, with consecutive increases over several months. But they're still way too low, sitting around 1½ per cent. It should be in the three-to-four per cent band. That's a sign of a healthy rental market. That has happened largely because the way people live has changed. Living arrangements have changed. People prefer to live in smaller households.

Before I talk about what we're going to do about it, let me tell you what we are not going to do about it. What we are not going to do is pit one Australian against another. We are not going to pit young against old. We are not going to pit the states against the Commonwealth. We are not going to pit property developers against everyone else. That is not how you solve a problem of this scale and magnitude. The blame game has to end, and it certainly has ended with us in this government. We have a Prime Minister who grew up in social housing to a single mother who was on a disability pension. He knew what economic deprivation was about. And, thanks to a roof over his head, he climbed the ladder of social mobility. That is what we want for every single Australian.

What we have is an ambitious plan to build 1.2 million homes through our National Housing Accord. It's called an accord for a reason. It channels the spirit of Bob Hawke, who had an accord at a time of great economic crisis in Australia. The accord is basically a coming-together and an agreement between states, territories, Commonwealth, industry and other stakeholders to get a big problem solved. Yes, it is ambitious, but we need to be ambitious, given the scale of the problem. We currently have around 169,000 households on the public waiting list for social—meaning public—housing. When you add all the people waiting community and Indigenous housing, that number rises to over 220,000. That's just the backlog. We then have to also build to accommodate growth in our population and the need for key workers. Our $32 billion Homes for Australia plan aims for building, buying and renting. It is a plan which has many moving parts to it, but essentially it's about cutting red tape, skilling up more tradies and incentivising the states to build. We know the Commonwealth does not hold all the levers. We do not, for example, control planning and zoning.

There is another ingredient that we do to some degree influence along with every other leader in this House and at the state and even local council levels, and that is the issue of NIMBYism. We really need as a country to take hard, long look at this issue of NIMBYism. It has led to the entrenchment of inequality in our country. People have said, hand on heart—and even in my electorate this happens—that they want more housing, just 'not in my backyard'. That has to stop. That narrative has got to stop. This problem is far too great, and it condemns our children to a lifetime of renting. We have increased Commonwealth rent assistance with two back-to-back increases. We're now putting $6 billion into the pockets of renters, which is helping 1.5 million Australians who are at acute risk of homelessness, and we've also expanded the Home Guarantee Scheme, which has seen 110,000 Australians move into homes.

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