Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion for the member for Indi and am very pleased to support the Housing Legislation Amendment (Fair Share for Regional Housing) Bill 2024. Around one in four people live in regional Australia, and accordingly it is appropriate—it's necessary—for our policy settings to reflect the population distribution across our nation. One would expect that, if public policy were written with this logic, the regions would have legislative consideration commensurate with our representative population; sadly, this is not the case. All too often, regions are given very little consideration. In fact, most of the time, we're not really considered much at all.

In the context of housing, the importance of rectifying this imbalance is particularly appropriate. Vacancy rates in some of my regions are as low as 0.4 per cent, considerably lower than the city and inner suburbs. Construction or upgrades to infrastructure necessary for housing developments takes more time in the regions and is typically more expensive. Many of the amendments tabled by the member for Indi have been discussed in this place before, and I commend the member's persistence in advocating for a fairer share of Australia's resources being allocated to the regions. Ensuring proportional expenditure in the regions, as laid out in amendment 1, is sensible and reasonable, as are the requirements of amendments 2 and 3 to report the amount and proportion of distributed funding to regional and rural and remote Australia.

Amendments 4 to 12 to the Housing Australia Future Fund Act address the current shortfalls and inequities in the act. These include identifying regional, rural and remote Australia as a group within the act; clarifying critical and enabling infrastructure for social and affordable housing—and that's really key; affordable rental housing, as the member for Indi mentioned, with respect to childcare workers; adding regional housing as the forth purpose in the act; and requiring the minister or Housing Australia to specify funding for regions when publishing information.

So much of public policy in this place is very much city centric and east coast centric. We need to lift our eyes and we need to recognise that one in four Australians live outside of the cities, outside of the suburbs, and they deserve to have public policy that addresses their needs too.

Debate adjourned.

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