Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In the 1980s the average house price was four times the average income. Today it is nine times the average income. After decades of policy failure and short-term thinking by governments on both sides it's harder for young Australians to buy a home now than it ever has been before. In one of the three least-populated countries in the world, we have the world's second most expensive housing.

This crisis is a direct result of the government's failure to plan and to act. Young people are being shut out of the market by rapidly rising house prices which have outpaced wages growth for more than a decade. The private rental market is also failing, with a persistent shortage of affordable homes. Those on low incomes and older single women are facing severe housing stress and, increasingly, homelessness.

The root of the problem is supply. Australia has one of the lowest numbers of homes per capita in the developed world. The federal government has set a target of 1.2 million new homes by 2030, but at our current pace we won't reach that goal. While we wait for those homes to be built, we must do more to help people who are struggling right now. As a matter of urgency, this government needs to increase support payments and Commonwealth rental assistance, ensuring that all vulnerable people receive the help that they need to be housed. The government must ensure that councils and state governments commit to the development of more social and affordable housing, and must work with them to ensure that this happens quickly, effectively and cost efficiently. Policemen, nurses, aged-care workers and childcare workers should be able to live somewhere close to where they work.

We could start this tomorrow by extending the national rental affordability scheme and by extending tax benefits to existing build-to-rent projects. We can look to innovative solutions like those proposed today by the Community Housing Institute of Australia, National Shelter and the Property Council of Australia. This would deliver 105,000 build-to-rent homes in less than 10 years with a less than $10 million commitment from this government. We could double the size of the Housing Australia Future Fund.

We also need to encourage investors not to leave homes empty in a housing crisis. Almost 98,000 homes in metropolitan Melbourne will be empty tonight. That is almost one in 20 homes. Those homes would house everyone on Victoria's social housing waitlist several times over. There's also land-banking by developers who secure planning approvals but don't act on them, and accumulate a buffer stock of approved sites. There are 120,000 sites approved and ready to be built immediately in Victoria, but either it's more profitable for those developers not to build on them yet or they can't find the construction staff.

In the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we agreed that adequate housing was part of the right to an adequate standard of living. In 2024 we realised that housing is a human right. It's the great Australian dream to own your own home, and we need to keep that dream alive. We also need to ensure that those people who can't buy a house can be sure of being housed throughout their lives. The government needs to do more to make this happen by incentivising investment in residential developments, addressing rising input costs and labour shortages, and encouraging states and councils to rezone and develop their land and to address land-banking and vacancies.

There are no immediate solutions to this problem, but there are many things that we could do today to improve housing affordability and availability. We can act now if we have vision, commitment and courage. In the middle of this unprecedented housing crisis, we must act now to ensure that every Australian has the chance to live in a safe, secure and affordable home. The future of our young people depends on it.

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