Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take this opportunity to make some observations about the issue of housing availability and affordability. These are critical needs across Australia and they are certainly present within my electorate of Fremantle. The housing challenge cuts across all areas of Australian society, but it particularly affects those who have the least, namely low-income earners, Indigenous people in remote communities, the disabled and the elderly. At the recent Australian Council of Social Service, ACOSS, national conference it was made clear that the lack of affordable housing has reached crisis levels. Housing experts say there is a shortfall of tens of thousands of social housing homes, a number that will only grow unless more is done to tackle the problem. The situation in Western Australia has been made worse by the resources boom, with the influx of workers, record low unemployment and high wages leading to a severe shortage in rental properties and a corresponding spike in rents. Only about four per cent of rentals in Perth are classed as affordable for someone earning less than $35,000. A recent report conducted by Anglicare WA found that, for someone earning the minimum wage, only 12 out of 3,500 listed rental properties in Perth were affordable. These conditions exist in parts of my electorate, and especially in the City of Fremantle, where the rental vacancy rate hovers around the one per cent mark.

Unfortunately this crisis in the housing sector has not been addressed with nearly enough urgency by the current WA state government. The Barnett government's Affordable Housing Strategy, released in May 2011, has done very little to turn things around, and their recent changes to the WA Building Act were followed, in the month of April, by a 47 per cent drop in building approvals. The constraints on housing supply and the lack of effective public policy action to address these problems cannot continue. While I am happy to say that I support the WA government's planning intention when it comes to achieving a significant amount of future housing as infill within the current metropolitan footprint, there is little in their policy framework that is designed to achieve this.

Anyone working in a community service role in WA encounters on a regular basis people who are almost literally falling through the cracks. Every week people approach my office because they cannot get access to social housing. The WA government's housing agency, Homes West, is virtually at a breaking point, with even its priority waiting list running at more than a one-year delay between acceptance on the list and the provision of a house. At the same time, the private rental market is priced out of the reach of low-income families.

This federal Labor government has implemented a range of initiatives to address these problems. The starting point was the reintroduction into cabinet of a dedicated minister for housing for the first time since 1996, and we followed that by commissioning a white paper on homelessness, in order to set our strategic target of halving homelessness by 2020. The National Rental Affordability Scheme was established in 2008 with the aim of increasing the supply of new affordable rental dwellings by providing incentives for properties that will be rented to eligible low- and middle-income earners at 20 per cent below market rents. This scheme is delivering an extra 5,000 affordable rentals in WA alone, including 692 new affordable rental homes in my electorate.

The government has also acted to alleviate pressure in housing with its $5.63 billion Social Housing Initiative. This initiative funded the construction of new dwellings and also increased expenditure on the repairs and maintenance of existing housing. So far, $589 million has been spent in WA, with 1,900 projects being carried out in the Fremantle electorate. The program was designed to deliver 19,600 homes across the nation and over 17,000 have already been built, with the rest near completion.

I was particularly pleased earlier this year when the Minister for Housing and Homelessness visited my electorate to open a fantastic project that was funded under the Social Housing Initiative. The Fort Knox Match development in the heart of Fremantle provides 58 affordable one-bedroom units thanks to a $22.8 million grant by the federal government. The development, which also involved funding input from the WA government, Match and Southern Cross Housing, features 24 units that will be allocated to social housing tenants and 12 that are class C adaptable, meaning that they can be easily modified for tenants with a disability. The whole development has a six-star energy rating as a result of its incorporation of sustainable technology and environmental design principles.

Housing is a fundamental human need, and so the availability and affordability of housing within a planning and regulatory framework that is properly led by government is not some marginal issue that can be left to the vagaries of the market or the private sector. It needs leadership, especially in the areas of greatest need—like social housing and disability housing—which are never going to be taken on by a for-profit developer. This government has shown that leadership and has made clear progress in supporting and delivering an increase in affordable housing. But the problem will not be substantially addressed in my home state of WA until the state government moves decisively to take its share of responsibility and to give this issue its correct priority.