Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the parliament about the government's incredibly broad and ambitious housing agenda. It's the broadest and most ambitious housing agenda a Commonwealth government has had for some decades. And the reason that we are taking this problem so seriously is very simple: this problem is having profound consequences for our country and for literally millions of Australians today.

I want to talk to you about some of the people I've talked to in these early months in the portfolio and just express their deep emotion about how much this problem is affecting their lives. Speaker, a lot of those conversations, you wouldn't be surprised to know, have been with young people. I've talked to a lot of young renters around the country, and they've talked to me about just the desolate experience that they have when they're between homes, spending every Saturday morning—instead of being able to spend time with their friends and their family—in rental queues. Some of these rental queues around Melbourne will go for 40 or 50 people. People have to literally spend hours looking at a property that is dilapidated and that they don't even want to live in. At the end of that process, that doesn't mean the young person gets the rental. They've got to fight with the other people who are standing in that queue. We see a lot of illegal behaviour where people are being encouraged to bid against each other, effectively raising the rental price. Most of the young people in that queue miss out. They talk to me about the sense of dread that they feel standing in those queues, knowing they've wasted yet another half a day trying to get into a rental property that they don't want and, in the end, not even getting there.

I've talked to a lot of parents, too. I hear quite a bit from parents about this. I think something that's really changed about the housing debate in this country is that, for the first time, the older generation are thinking about this in the context of those younger people. I talk to parents who are desperately worried about their children, and I'm not talking about 25- or 26-year-old children; they're worried about their teenage children and what the housing market will look like for them when they get into that age group. I talk to a lot of young people who are still living at home with their parents. They're not particularly young people but those who are 28 and 29—even young people in their 30s who are still at home with their parents just so they can try to get that opportunity to scrimp and save for a modest house deposit.

I talk to a lot of renters who are living a life of intense instability. I rented when I was a young person; I'm sure you would have rented a bit in your youth as well, Speaker. My view is there comes a time when Australians are entitled to expect stability in their lives, and, really, that time is around when people look to start having a family. All of us have talked to constituents who are in their 30s, with young children who are in early years and in school, who are renting. This is exactly the sort of Australian family that in the 1980s would in all likelihood—almost certainly—have owned their own home. And yet, today, these people are locked out of the housing market. The impact this is having on their lives is absolutely profound. I've talked to mums who have children with disability, who have to pick those kids up and move them from one school to another because they don't have the stability and the housing that they need. All of us talk to constituents who are spending extensive amounts of time travelling—I'm talking about more than an hour a day and more than two hours a day in a car—when they could have been spending that precious time with their children and their family. All of this comes back to the problem that we're having with housing in our country

We've got a really clear plan here, and it's one that we thought about a lot in opposition and brought forward. From the experts I talk to, there's pretty unanimous agreement that the things that the Labor government is trying to do about this problem are the right things—things that, frankly, could have been done a long time ago. We're having some issues though—you might have noticed, Speaker—in progressing a couple of areas of reform, and that is because we face an incredible intransigence in this parliament. We don't just have a broken housing market in this country; we have broken housing politics. What I mean by that is we've got a lot of parliamentarians who come in here, say all the right things, and then, when it's time to take action and make real progress for real people, they instead turn their back on Australians and choose politics over progress.

We see that extensively from those who sit opposite me, and it's not much of a surprise really because housing has just never been a priority for the coalition. When I talk to Australians about what they feel produced the housing crisis that we're dealing with right now, they often point to what was effectively 10 years of inaction from those opposite. I'll remind you of a couple of things that really speak to this. We had a coalition government for almost a decade in this country, and for five of those years there was actually no Commonwealth housing minister. They're trying to get credibility in this debate. For most of the time they were in government, there was no Commonwealth housing minister. I try to be polite and respectful in this parliament, but there are a few things I could say about how the people they choose to lead this debate reflect the importance that they place on it, and I think we saw that with the choice of the housing minister and the current shadow housing minister.

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