Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I don't need to spell out just how bad the housing crisis has become, as so many are living it, but the figures are truly alarming. In Brisbane, house prices have doubled in the last 10 years, growing by nearly 15 per cent in the last year alone. Meanwhile, wages in Australia are stagnating or actually going backwards. Renters are trapped in a vicious cycle, unable to save for a deposit because average rents have spiked 43 per cent in the last few years, and you would need to find 61 per cent of the average wage to service a mortgage. In Brisbane, you need an income of almost $200,000 a year and a deposit of $165,000, which is completely unaffordable for so many.

The Albanese government continues to ignore the crisis and push fake solutions that only make the problem worse, like offering up money for a vanishingly small number of first home buyers. This will only drive up house prices further. Every day, people know that this is a huge problem. Recent polling shows that 73 per cent of people think housing should be a basic human right, while only nine per cent said it should be a vehicle for growing personal wealth; 15 per cent of people believe that house prices should continue to rise, while 45 per cent want them to stabilise and 40 per cent want them to fall. Yet the Labor government continues to offer fake solutions, policies that throw more money at the very people who created this crisis with their massive profits and corporate greed.

Labor is unwilling to touch negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, locking in skyrocketing house prices. These policies are rigged in favour of wealthy investors and property developers. The major parties don't want house prices to stabilise, because it goes against the interests of their friends in the property industry. The idea that housing should be a basic human right isn't radical. It's not extreme. It's common sense. It's a necessity. Housing is fundamental to the flourishing of our society. Everyone deserves a safe and affordable place to live.

The government needs to get back to the business of building homes. Bring property development back into public hands to build homes for people, not for profit. We've done it before in Australia—post-World War II, when up to a quarter of new homes built were public housing. But now the number of social homes per capita in Queensland alone has fallen by 10 per cent in the last decade. People are sleeping in tents, and parents are living in cars with their children, all because of the government's utter failure to invest in and build enough public housing. For too long, private developers have been given free rein to control the housing market. Housing should, at its most basic level, be about people having homes, not for speculative wealth generation for some. Even with a deposit, only 13 per cent of the homes sold in 2022-23 were affordable for a median-income household. We've seen affordable housing stock fall from 5.6 per cent to just 3.8 per cent, and, compared to other OECD countries, the amount of social and affordable housing we have in our system is appallingly low.

Over the next 10 years, Labor will give property investors $175 billion in tax handouts through negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts. Meanwhile, most renters and mortgage holders will get nothing. Labor is giving money to big investors, turbocharging house prices, and pretty much screwing over everyone else. Labor's so-called Help to Buy scheme does nothing for 99.8 per cent of renters who are denied access to this scheme. It could actually make the housing crisis worse by putting more pressure on house prices. And their build to rent scheme, just more tax breaks for developers to build unaffordable apartments.

How do we solve this crisis? We scrap tax handouts for investors so that renters finally have a chance to buy their first home, freeze and cap rent increases to make it illegal for landlords to hike up the rent as much as they want and invest the savings we make from scrapping investor tax handouts into a government owned developer that will build homes for people to buy and rent for cheap. Building homes—we used to do it. We need a housing system that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few.

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