Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Kooyong proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The need for the government to urgently address the chronic shortage of housing in Australia.

I call upon those honourable members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to 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.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the matter of public importance. I really genuinely thank the member for Kooyong for bringing this debate forward. I've been in my job for just a couple of days beyond two weeks now, and one of the things I would say is that the intense politicisation of what is going on in housing policy at the moment I don't think is actually helping us move towards the right solution for the country. There are people who are sitting today on the crossbench who are part of the solution, not part of the problem, such as the member for Kooyong and the member for Wentworth, who is also here. These are smart women who are deeply engaged in the policy detail and really thinking about the ways in which our government can work with states and territories and others who are part of this space to get better solutions for Australians. I want to commend them for their engagement on this.

Since I was appointed to this new role as Minister for Housing and Minister for Homelessness, I have, as you would expect, spent a lot of time talking to people around the country who are really seriously affected by Australia's housing crisis. I have talked to a lot of renters, a group I am very, very concerned about right now, people who are in real distress and who are seeing rents rising too frequently and too fast. I've seen and talked to people who are trying to get into housing. They've told me their stories of standing in queues to look at rentals which have had literally 100 people in them. I've talked to renters who are being treated really badly by their landlords, who are living in homes where there's black mould that will not be removed and where the basic functionality of the home is not being looked after. I know that, for renters, that is combined with this incredibly deep sense of injustice that they are every day, they feel, moving further away from that dream of homeownership.

I've talked to young people who I am also really worried about. We have had a promise in our country for a long time that generations of Australians can have a reasonable expectation of homeownership. I know this generation of young people feel that that is slipping beyond their grasp.

What we see is that the net effect of all that's going on in housing at the moment is flowing directly through to the homelessness sector. I was very pleased and honoured to open National Homelessness Week. A couple of weeks ago I talked to activists all over the sector. I also talked to some people who are long-term homeless. There are absolutely gut-wrenching stories about things that have seen people pushed into homelessness. I've also spoken to people who have been able to come out of it and people who have talked to me about the fact that, after a lifetime of abuse and neglect has occurred for them, secure and affordable housing has been a pathway towards them being able to address those problems and rebuild their lives.

Suffice it to say I have enormous passion for the project that is in front of me. Housing is not about nuts and bolts. It's not just about bricks and mortar. This is the foundation on which every person living in our country builds their life and experiences the citizenship that we offer here, and so nothing could be more important right now than trying to address the concerns of millions of people around our country for whom housing is a life-defining issue.

This housing crisis has been a generation in the making. There are complex causes of the problem, but if I could distil it down to one thing it would be the failure of governments at varying levels over a whole set of decades to properly invest in, think about and develop policies to make sure that we have enough homes in our country. The member for Kooyong spoke a little bit about this in her address. The bottom line and fundamental problem and the issues that people are seeing in the housing market at the moment all come back to the fact that we have not been building enough homes, and we are still not building enough homes fast enough.

That is why our government is stepping into this space. We came into government two years ago after a decade of complete and abject neglect in this policy area. I want to share two facts about that neglect. The first is that we came out of a period of nine years of coalition government and, for the last five years of that government, housing ministers around this country did not meet once. This has got to be a collaboration between the states and the Commonwealth and, indeed, local government. The housing ministers did not meet once. I can tell you something too: we have launched a $32 billion homes for Australians plan and we spent more, invested more, in housing in just our last federal budget than the coalition did in their entire nine years combined. That's how seriously they took this issue.

We are a nation today led by a person whose access to safe, secure and affordable housing in his childhood transformed the entire trajectory of his life. We have a housing crisis in this country and a Prime Minister who grew up in public housing, so it's not surprising that we have a bold and ambitious agenda to try to address the problem that's in front of us. Our government has worked with the states and territories to build a target for housing across the country. We have an ambitious, bold goal of building 1.2 million homes in our country in the coming five years. It is bold and ambitious, and it is bold and ambitious because not being bold and ambitious is not going to help us fix this problem. It is exactly what we need to do.

This means that the Commonwealth has got to get in and get more active in housing policy. You've seen that in the national leadership that we've provided, in funding and incentives that have been provided to state governments to get homes built more quickly. You've seen it in the tremendous work that has been done around skills and in training more tradies, funding more apprenticeships and growing that workforce. There were 20,000 fee-free TAFE places in the last budget alone to improve the number of construction workers in our country. Of course, there's that really important investment in social housing that our government has made, delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to help reduce homelessness. The $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund is critical to this.

The fruits of all this effort are starting to come forward in the community. Actually, this morning I had this incredible experience of going out with the ACT housing minister, Yvette Berry, and looking at three new public housing units that the ACT government is just about to move new tenants in to. What the government has done here is take what was an enormous block of land here in Canberra and build three brand-new units. These are units that are designed for proper access for people with disability, and they are designed for people, women in particular, who are fleeing from violence with their children. This is really important work that's happening, and it's a real pleasure to be part of it.

We have this big goal of building 1.2 million homes over a five-year period, but I really want Australians to hear that we understand that you are in pain right now and of course that's not all we're doing. Of course we have a suite of policies aimed at trying to help people get the relief that they need while they wait for more homes to come online.

So a few really important things have happened here. The member for Kooyong talked about the increases to Commonwealth rent assistance. We have just executed two back-to-back increases to Commonwealth rent assistance. That's the first time that has happened in 30 years. There are more than a million households around the country who now have more than $1,000 a year extra in their pockets since we came to government, through those increases to rent assistance. We're working through National Cabinet to improve the rental experience too, and there are some really important commitments that the states have signed up to as part of the National Housing Accord to make sure that, for people who are in rentals, they're being treated appropriately.

I also want to call out the work that is being done on the Home Guarantee Scheme. We have helped 110,000 Australians get into homeownership through the Home Guarantee Scheme. That's twice the number that were supported under the previous government. I've talked a little bit about the government's agenda and things that have already been agreed to and funded. I want to be really clear here: I recognise that there is more that needs to be done. No-one is pretending that the crisis is fixed and no-one is pretending that the crisis is over, but what I hope people hear from me is that we have a really good offering here—$32 billion that will be invested in housing. I as minister am dedicated to providing the drive and energy we need to actually see that money hit the ground and make sure that people feel the effects.

I do want to mention that we have two really important pieces of policy that are stuck in the Senate at the moment that the Greens and the Liberals are refusing to move forward. They have built this incredibly hyperpoliticised and very unfortunate alliance, which has blocked just about everything that we have tried to do to support the housing needs of Australians. It's really disappointing. There are two important initiatives here. One is called a help to buy scheme. This is something that would be critical in helping Australians who are on the lower end of the income spectrum to access the housing market when they otherwise wouldn't be able to do that. The other is creating a better build-to-rent market here in Australia, something the member for Kooyong also talked about.

I would say that we've got a really significant problem on our hands here as a country. We're not going to fix this by doing politics as usual. I call on all parties in the government to emulate the best practice of the member for Kooyong, bring these discussions forward and work together to try to make a fix for this.

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is our collective responsibility to leave the next generation with better opportunities than we've had—to be good ancestors. But, in failing to address housing affordability, we are not living up to this responsibility. Across Australian capital cities, house prices relative to incomes have become some of the highest in the world, with Sydney having the second most unaffordable housing in the world after Hong Kong.

I acknowledge that the government has made some positive steps in this place and has put housing on the agenda in this parliament. I think that's absolutely critical, and I know the government has committed significant resources to this area. But I believe that, after two decades of what is, frankly, buck-passing between federal, state and local governments and the major parties, we have to do more. We have to do more here, but we also have to do more at each of the other levels of government.

There are four key areas where the federal government can have a significant impact that goes even further than where it is now. Firstly, we need to strengthen the incentives for state and local governments to unlock housing approvals in Australian urban areas. Secondly, we need to support the availability of skills and materials, to bring down costs and increase the viability of development. Thirdly, we need to push the states to improve renters' rights, particularly in New South Wales, where I'm from and where we still have no-grounds evictions, which are undermining renters' rights across my state. Finally, we need to reform the tax system to provide greater and more equal opportunities for housing in Australia.

Housing represents a fundamental source of security that enables family planning, as well as a comfortable retirement. But housing is increasingly out of reach for younger generations. Since 1981, the rate of homeownership for those aged between 30 and 34 has declined 20 per cent, to fewer than half. Over the same period, the share of people relying on the bank of mum and dad to buy their first home has increased from 19 per cent to 40 per cent. That is not the Australian dream. We are a country where it doesn't matter what your parents earn. It shouldn't matter what they have. You should have access to those opportunities and the ability, if you're a nurse and a teacher coming together, to build a home or buy a home and set up your family. Unaffordable housing increases inequality and division in our society, robs our cities of essential workers, worsens the brain drain of our best and brightest, and discourages migrants, who we need as our population naturally ages.

I'd like to start, firstly, on the area of the National Housing Accord and how to build these homes. This target of 1.2 million homes that the government has committed to focusing on is absolutely critical. But I'm concerned that the target is seen as out of reach and that we don't have interim incentives for the states and local governments to take action now and to help them through the difficult planning and reforms that they need to take on and sell to the electorate over the next period of five years. They need some interim support to deliver this.

My second significant concern is about the skills and the materials. I agree with the RBA that, frankly, our infrastructure pipeline, both at the federal level and at all the state levels, is so significant that it is actually increasing construction costs in both labour and materials, at a time when our focus must be on housing. So I call on the government to delay the infrastructure spending that it can, particularly those large projects that are competing on those costs, and, at the same time, to reform the new fast-track migrant visa to ensure that construction workers are not kept out of that visa group, because we should, if we need them, be bringing in that group of construction workers as fast as we possibly can.

Thirdly, I would like to see the government continue to put pressure on the states, possibly through incentives, to make the reforms to rental rights that are absolutely required, in terms of both no-grounds evictions and increasing the incentives for longer-term leases. I recognise that what is actually before the Senate at the moment—and it's something I spoke on this morning—is the opportunity to increase social and affordable housing by improving those tax incentives and also, at the same time, to increase affordable housing and long-term leases for those people in build-to-rent environments. I think that's absolutely critical, and I urge the Senate to adopt those bills.

Finally, I'm going to talk about the tax system, because there are a number of taxes that affect the housing system. They are not the main driver, but they are key. Stamp duty is a tax on people who move. It is inequitable. It is a state tax, but the federal government can be part of driving the solution. Secondly, negative gearing and capital gains tax are not the main drivers of cost of housing, but they do play into the difficulties for people to own their own homes, and I think that is a reasonable thing for the government to be looking at.

There are few areas that are going to define the opportunities of a generation. Housing is one, and it is one that we must act on in this parliament and in every parliament in the future. (Time expired)

Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kooyong for bringing forward this matter of public importance. While we all agree we need to build more homes, the member for Kooyong and I also agree we need to build more finals campaigns for the Carlton Football Club—something that, unfortunately, I don't think is going to be happening this year, Member for Kooyong. It's causing me great distress in this place. Anyway, I thank the member for Kooyong for this matter of public importance.

We do need to build more homes for Australia. In fact, what we need to be is YIMBYs. We need more YIMBYs in this place—'Yes, in my back yard'—not NIMBYs, which is what the Greens are not only in our community but all around the country. There isn't a housing project that they don't like to oppose. Even on the building of social housing in my electorate, the Greens are running up and down the electorate saying, 'Not in our back yard.' There isn't a public housing project that the Greens aren't willing to oppose—certainly not in Port Melbourne.

We on the side of the House understand that we actually need to build more homes if we are to have more homes. You can't have more homes if you object to more homes, as the Greens like to do. If you object to a government program that would help Australians who have only up to two per cent for a deposit to get into the housing market, you can't then expect more Australians to get into the housing market, but that is the Greens' approach. They stand in the Senate with their fists raised high, saying, 'We don't want to support the government's Help to Buy scheme,' and then they complain that we don't have enough help to buy. This is the classic example.

But you wouldn't think that the Greens are doing this by themselves. No, it's not just the Greens. They have very good mates over there in the Liberals and Nationals. Those two groups are chummy. They are really tight these days, because they know that, if they work together, they can block as many houses as possible. They can block the Housing Australia Future Fund for ages. They can block the Help to Buy scheme. They can block the build-to-rent scheme. The Greens are as thick as thieves with the Liberal Party and the National Party, and they are willing to work together.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Every single time that the government has tried to get back to the table and use the levers of government to try and ensure that there are more homes for more Australians, the Greens and the Liberal Party have huddled in their little group and said: 'We've got to block this one. We've got to work together to slow them down, because it's in our political interests to slow down the government.' That is their approach. It's all about politics and not about building more homes.

We know that right now Australians are doing it tough to get into the housing market. We know that in relation to the price of housing, when you look at the cost of building homes and the cost of going through the planning processes, a lot of the levers are not the levers of the federal government; they are the levers of local and state governments. Those are the levers that we absolutely need to be working on collaboratively with other levels of government in order to ensure that there is more land and there are more opportunities for more homes to be built for more Australians. But the Greens and the Liberal Party are hell-bent either on taking the federal government out of all construction of homes—as those opposite did, having washed their hands of any responsibility for building homes in the social and affordable housing sector at all—or, like the Greens, on letting every opportunity become a political opportunity. The Greens want to build lots of campaigns but don't want to build many homes.

That's where we are right now. We are waiting for the Greens and the Liberals to stop working together so that we can get those two important reforms through the Senate. At the same time, we have a fantastic new Minister for Housing who is building off the really important work of the previous Minister for Housing, with $30-plus billion worth of investment into housing right across the country. That is all about trying to ensure that the federal government is doing its bit in investing in the construction of new homes right around the country, whether it be thousands and thousands of social housing homes or homes for women and children fleeing domestic violence. We know that too many women and children have that wicked choice between staying in a dangerous place and having nowhere to go, and we need to do more to ensure that that doesn't become a reality for Australians, as we know it is each and every day.

We are also investing in the long-term housing pipeline to ensure that the federal government is doing its bit, but this really has to be a collaborative effort between state government, local government and federal government. It's an investment in budget and also an investment in reform. We need everyone saying yes. We need everyone working together. We don't need the Greens and the Liberal Party slowing things down and saying, 'Not in my backyard.' They're working together, huddled together and fighting against the Labor Party for votes. We should be building more houses, not building political campaigns like the Greens are in this country. So, we say yes to more homes, while the Greens are going to fight it each and every day.

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

I commend the member for Kooyong, as I did the member for Indi earlier this week who brought a motion into the parliament looking at housing. I particularly commend the member for Kooyong's matter of public importance today because we need to make sure that this issue stays on the agenda.

I supported the government's Housing Australia Future Fund and its Social Housing Accelerator program, but I must say that while I supported these significant investments, I don't believe that they alone will be a panacea for our housing crisis. We also need to look at the demand that we're creating. According to Treasury and OECD figures, Australia has fewer dwellings per 1,000 people than the OECD average, and we've a supply of just 420 per 1,000 people. This places us in the bottom 11 countries, well below the OECD average. I believe this imbalance has been worsened—and my community believes it has been worsened—by the record migration numbers.

As reported in syndicated papers today, the government's 'big Australia' policy has somewhat exacerbated the housing problem that we have today. We've seen 1.15 million migrants come into Australia since the change of government. This represents 62 per cent more migrants than under the Rudd-Gillard government, which was the previous record holder, and more migrants in 27 months then under the Hawke-Keating government, which was in power for 156 months.

The unchecked intake is supercharging demand on housing; it's supercharging demand on everything. In 2022, the median housing price was 4.9 times the median gross disposable income. In early 2024, this increased to 8.6 times. It's also taking Australians much longer to save for a deposit. Back in 2022, it took less than seven years to save a 20 per cent deposit. Now, it's taking 11 years.

We know homeownership gives you the greatest financial stability in life; it gives security and stability. The best chance of you having a good life into retirement relies on you owning your own home. For those lucky enough to own a home, the cost of servicing these loans has crippled household budgets after 12 interest rate rises. The RBA acknowledges that migration under the Labor government has contributed to inflation, and that has led to these interest rate rises. So I think we need to have a very sober conversation about migration when we're talking about housing.

It is even more difficult for renters, especially in the regions. As I mentioned in a speech earlier this week, the Domain June 2024 rental report shows a quarter-on-quarter increase of 0.8 per cent for houses and 4.3 per cent for units in Adelaide. Going to the regions, in Mount Barker the increase was 10.8 per cent to June and a staggering 52.7 per cent over five years. Similarly, rent in Victor Harbor has increased by more than 50 per cent over the last five years. We are seeing people who have grown up in an area being forced out of that area simply because they can't afford to live there. Local government areas of Alexandrina, encompassing the Fleurieu, and Kangaroo Island have experienced a 20 per cent annual increase in rent and a five-year increase to 76.5 per cent. These figures are absurd, and they're forcing people into poverty.

None of the government's policies or initiatives aimed at increasing housing supply will work if, as I said, we don't also address the demand side of this issue. Current projections are that a child born today will be nearly 40 years old—this is assuming they start work at the age of 20—before they've saved enough for their housing deposit. That means that in one generation, effectively, we've taken away the great Australian dream. Shame on us for doing that. This is not the future that I want for my children or for my grandchildren. I urge us all to work together to look at solutions that look at supply. They also must look at the demand side of the equation. Otherwise, we're just creating a Ponzi scheme here.

Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a really important MPI about the housing crisis currently facing Australia, so I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to talk about some of the policies that our government is putting in place. Last week was national Homelessness Week, a week which raises awareness of homelessness in Australia and the importance of social and affordable housing as a long-term solution. Of course, in a country like Australia, everyone should have a safe place to call home, and this is something that our government is working on.

To mark the week, I visited the Early Morning Centre here in my electorate on Northbourne Avenue and talked to Nicole Wiggins, who runs the Early Morning Centre, to hear about how they're going with their service, which provides vital support to people experiencing homelessness in Canberra. They provide food, but they also provide services and link people up with a range of supports there at their place at the Uniting Church. I'm proud to have engaged with them regularly over the five years I've been an MP, but before I was in parliament I was a regular volunteer there for a long time.

Before that, I volunteered for many years at another organisation, talking with people experiencing homelessness. I think understanding the issues that can lead anyone into homelessness and the accompanying problems that people then experience gives a powerful example of why a home is so important. For anyone to build their life and have a happy, healthy and fulfilled life, it must start with the security of a place to call home.

Those experiences of talking with those people are a big part of what led me to want to be in politics and be part of governments that are going to fix these problems. While there are many in our community doing amazing work, like the Early Morning Centre and the volunteers there—and I want to quickly shout out to everyone in Canberra that is supporting people facing homelessness—it is governments that have a really important role in ensuring that people can find a place to call home. That's why I'm so proud that that is exactly what we've seen from the Albanese Labor government.

A few weeks ago I was really proud to join the former housing minister Julie Collins and also our ACT housing minister Yvette Berry to visit some new public housing in my electorate which had recently been completed and was ready to go in the inner north. We heard about how soon some Canberrans would be moving into that excellent housing. It was well designed, with beautiful, bright homes in a great location. We just heard the new minister talking about more of these dwellings that are going to be opened in Canberra shortly. It's projects like this that are being built all across the nation as part of our $32 billion Homes for Australia plan.

Additionally, our government and state and territory governments have recently signed a new agreement on social housing and homelessness. That agreement will see the ACT receive $157 million in funding to boost their construction program and build scores of new, additional public homes. This is what happens when you have the different levels of government working hand in hand together to address a crisis affecting Australians.

We all know that there is a shortage of housing, and we know that we need to build more homes quickly all around the country. That's why one of the first things we did when we came to government was sign the once-in-a-generation National Housing Accord with the states and territories, with the ambitious goal of building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade. It will be the most homes that have been built in our history. To date, the government has invested $32 billion to build those new homes. In fact, in the last budget alone, there was more money for new homes than in all of the budgets of the former government combined.

Our government is providing national leadership on this issue. We're funding and incentivising states and territories to get more homes built. We're training more tradies, funding more apprenticeships and growing the workforce. We're delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to help reduce homelessness. For people who are renting, we've increased rent assistance, and for those looking to buy for the first time we've assisted more than 110,000 Australians through the Home Guarantee Scheme.

There's always more we can do, and I know that, when I'm talking to my community here in Canberra, housing is of course an issue at front of mind, but I am proud to be part of a government that also has this at front of mind and is working to get homes for Australians.

Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also would like to thank the member for Kooyong for bringing this matter of public importance to the House. Having a roof over our heads is something that most of us take for granted. I say 'most' because there are Australians who do know what it's like to be homeless. Having been homeless myself by the ravages of war, I spent many years as a refugee, never knowing any sense of a permanent or stable home environment. Like the Prime Minister, I also grew up in public housing after our resettlement here in Australia. We were incredibly lucky, privileged and grateful that Australia had the right economic circumstances for us to rebuild our lives and the opportunities to work for a stable and prosperous future.

As we've been hearing today in the House, the economic conditions are becoming more challenging for many working Australians, also making it harder for our young people and those on low income to save to buy a home or even to rent. It doesn't take a PhD in economics to understand that high prices are driven by a shortage in housing supply. Whilst population increase is measured across the whole of Australia, it is not evenly distributed. Australia has relied more and more on immigration to boost population growth as birth rates have decreased, and the major cities have inevitably seen populations boom because that's where the jobs and infrastructure are. My electorate of Fowler has felt the increase particularly sharply, especially in the past decade, where we have seen almost 20,000 refugees and asylum seekers resettled in my electorate. These new arrivals require a roof over their heads and also create demand for services.

With over 50 per cent of Fowler's population born overseas, compared to 30 per cent of Australia, many come here to make a new life, seeking opportunities. Homeownership is a pipe dream for anybody other than the super-rich as the incredible cost of building new homes means that it's becoming nearly impossible even to find a home to rent. In Fowler, almost 44 per cent of the population rent. With a high population on low incomes, how on earth can these individuals afford the increase in rents as well? This is a terrible situation.

Homeownership is about more than just financial security for those who live in them; homeownership inculcates a commitment to a local community. It strengthens the ties that bind us to our neighbours and to our country. Many of the great buildings of Australia such as the New South Wales parliament building and the Queen Victoria Building were built before government regulation had reached its tentacles into the finest details of the planning and building processes. Yes, we have seen a sea change in the safety and welfare provisions for workers in that span of time, and many of those regulations are good and in the best interests of us all, but the taxation and regulation of the building industry is another example of the ability to legislate going out of control.

I know that the Prime Minister had faced attacks from his own New South Wales state premier on the lack of housing, so, in the spirit of the House of Representatives's cooperation and solidarity, I want to help him. The fact is that New South Wales's state taxation and planning restrictions play a significant role in the cost of building houses in our great state. The zoning tax, for example, is the price you pay for the legal right to put a dwelling on a piece of land. This rate obviously increases the value. In Sydney, zoning tax accountant for 42 per cent of the cost of a house in 68 per cent of the cost of an apartment in 2016. That's before we even begin talking about increasing costs of Labor and building material. The Prime Minister could do something at the federal level to pressure his state and territory colleagues to increase the housing supply. He could remind Premier Minns that he stood beside him at the announcement of the National Housing Accord. Instead of the Premier asking for more money from the federal government, he could be reminded that New South Wales has been given a lot of money for infrastructure already. Every opportunity should be taken, when federal infrastructure funds go out to the states and territories, to make it conditional on building a specific number of new homes. Writing cheques for Sydney Metro's Beaches Link and the Aerotropolis project should be accompanied by the demand to build them.

Unless the nettle is grasped on increasing housing supply, we are going to see profound change for the worse in our societal values and standard of living. We don't need to wait for things to get worse; I think we're already there.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank my colleague and neighbour, the member for Kooyong, for raising this important motion. Like her, I have very many young Australians struggling to find a home. I have a great many young adults still living with their parents. I have people who are now living in cars in council car parks, and is this happening in Higgins, which should give you an indication as to how bad it is elsewhere. It's not as if they don't have a job. They do have jobs. It's just that they can't make rent. We have too many Australians right around the country who are spinning their wheels in this purgatory of insecure housing. We're even seeing the emergence of tent cities in some parts of our country, which is an absolute indictment and should not be happening in a country that is one of the wealthiest in the world. In the OECD, we are the 11th-wealthiest country when it comes to a average income. There's no shortage of money in this country.

When it comes to housing, Australian dwellings peaked in 2016 and have been in decline ever since. When you compare us to the OECD, which is a club of mostly rich countries, we have below-average rates of social and affordable housing. What added to this, of course, was this major shock, the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, rental vacancies were sitting in the healthy three-to-four per cent range. After the pandemic, they plummeted to one per cent or less. In the last few months, we've seen an increase in rental vacancies, with consecutive increases over several months. But they're still way too low, sitting around 1½ per cent. It should be in the three-to-four per cent band. That's a sign of a healthy rental market. That has happened largely because the way people live has changed. Living arrangements have changed. People prefer to live in smaller households.

Before I talk about what we're going to do about it, let me tell you what we are not going to do about it. What we are not going to do is pit one Australian against another. We are not going to pit young against old. We are not going to pit the states against the Commonwealth. We are not going to pit property developers against everyone else. That is not how you solve a problem of this scale and magnitude. The blame game has to end, and it certainly has ended with us in this government. We have a Prime Minister who grew up in social housing to a single mother who was on a disability pension. He knew what economic deprivation was about. And, thanks to a roof over his head, he climbed the ladder of social mobility. That is what we want for every single Australian.

What we have is an ambitious plan to build 1.2 million homes through our National Housing Accord. It's called an accord for a reason. It channels the spirit of Bob Hawke, who had an accord at a time of great economic crisis in Australia. The accord is basically a coming-together and an agreement between states, territories, Commonwealth, industry and other stakeholders to get a big problem solved. Yes, it is ambitious, but we need to be ambitious, given the scale of the problem. We currently have around 169,000 households on the public waiting list for social—meaning public—housing. When you add all the people waiting community and Indigenous housing, that number rises to over 220,000. That's just the backlog. We then have to also build to accommodate growth in our population and the need for key workers. Our $32 billion Homes for Australia plan aims for building, buying and renting. It is a plan which has many moving parts to it, but essentially it's about cutting red tape, skilling up more tradies and incentivising the states to build. We know the Commonwealth does not hold all the levers. We do not, for example, control planning and zoning.

There is another ingredient that we do to some degree influence along with every other leader in this House and at the state and even local council levels, and that is the issue of NIMBYism. We really need as a country to take hard, long look at this issue of NIMBYism. It has led to the entrenchment of inequality in our country. People have said, hand on heart—and even in my electorate this happens—that they want more housing, just 'not in my backyard'. That has to stop. That narrative has got to stop. This problem is far too great, and it condemns our children to a lifetime of renting. We have increased Commonwealth rent assistance with two back-to-back increases. We're now putting $6 billion into the pockets of renters, which is helping 1.5 million Australians who are at acute risk of homelessness, and we've also expanded the Home Guarantee Scheme, which has seen 110,000 Australians move into homes.

Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Queensland has recently been characterised as the homelessness capital of Australia. The statistics are eye watering. Brisbane property prices have increased by 65 per cent since 2020—almost double the Australian capital city average of 34 per cent. Across the state, new tenancy rents also climbed faster than across the nation, rising by 45 per cent over the same period. With the market in its current state, it is without doubt that it's renters and first home buyers that are going to be at the sharp end of this crisis. These conditions have pushed more people into homelessness as well. The number of people depending on homelessness services has surged by more than 34 per cent since 2020. This housing crisis is an intergenerational and economic justice issue.

This government goes on and on about how well it's doing, but that is not how the community feels on the ground. Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. House prices continue to soar. Rents continue to soar. Interest rates aren't coming down, and vacancy rates continue to make it incredibly difficult even to find a home to live in in the first place. Tinkering around the edges with some poorly put together, neoliberal policies just will not work. The housing market in this country is structurally broken, so it's time to think outside the box. But when you see the world through a neoliberal lens, as this government does, that influences both how you perceive problems and how you find solutions.

The reason this government is not doing anything bold or system changing is because those opposite think they're nailing it. They've tried all these poorly put together, neoliberal policies, but they're out of ideas. The reason the government only puts forward these bandaid neoliberal solutions is that that's all they're capable of. That's all their politics will allow them to do. I say to the already seemingly embattled new minister: think outside the box, outside neoliberalism. A public developer is needed to pick up the private sector's inaction. We need a huge bill of public housing to provide homes that are actually affordable, not just at a small discount from market rate. We need a rent freeze and caps to provide relief to people right now, and we need to wind back negative gearing and change the capital gains tax discount.

Research out this week from the Australian Institute has revealed that the 200 richest people in this country now have a combined wealth equal to 25 per cent of national GDP. These levels of inequality will harm our country more and more the worse they get. The report argues that there is no way to meaningfully address this housing crisis or even the cost-of-living crisis without tackling the huge levels of wealth disparity that are fuelling both of these crises. To quote the report:

Although the political barriers to making this change are likely to be substantial, failure to confront the problem will consign the nation to ever-increasing inequality.

So there we have it. Outside-the-box solutions are needed if this country has any hope of an egalitarian future—something we like to think we already have but we all know, deep down, we do not.

Two and a half years of this government and what next? A build-to-rent bill, which was universally panned by experts and lobby groups from all sides of politics, and more of the same tired thinking—not bold and not courageous. We have a government that has thrown in the towel. This is a government that doesn't want to rock the boat, doesn't want system change, and is more concerned about not upsetting the LNP or the megawealthy. People have hit breaking point and won't tolerate business as usual anymore. The longer this government does not act, the worst this problem gets. We cannot just wait for the market to sort itself out, because the market is the problem. All this does is kick the can down the road. We need solutions outside the box. Bandaids here and there do not cut it. This is about addressing rampant wealth inequality and intergenerational unfairness. Housing is a human right, and it is about time the government treated it as such.

Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the way in which all members have come to this debate. We all agree that housing affordability is a huge issue in this country; however, unlike the previous member, the member for Brisbane, we don't treat this as a debating society. We aren't talking about political philosophy here; we're talking about pragmatic solutions to actually address the housing affordability issue.

I like the out-of-the-box thinking that the member for Brisbane is proposing, and if this was a reality show where we tried to pit idea against idea, sure, we'd bring out this out-of-the-box thinking. But, of course, there are constitutional issues with the policies that he proposes. There's also a reality issue with the policies that he proposes. Who does he think builds developments? Who does he think builds homes? There are private-sector developers, and we don't want to badmouth them and kick them out of this country and have a total government takeover, because that is not what is going to make a material difference on the ground when it comes to getting more homes built. That will probably delay homes being built, because you would have to set up a whole system of government funded builders and developers to go out and start building, and that takes time.

He and I both recognise the real challenges of housing affordability in this country. It is especially pronounced in Sydney, the city that I lived in. Sydney is ranked as the world's second-least affordable market, after Hong Kong, and housing affordability is one of the biggest challenges for Sydneysiders. But it hasn't always been this way. When my parents came to this country more than four decades ago, they worked hard and were able to buy a home within five years of coming to this country. Our family's success was possible because they had the stability of housing, but that stability is out of reach for so many people in Sydney now.

So how did we get here, because a problem this big does not spring up in two years? It's a problem that has been brewing for years and years. As the previous members who have spoken on this issue have pointed out, the key challenge is that we are not building enough homes. We're not building enough affordable, social and private housing. We are not building enough of all of it—the whole gamut. We are here in this situation because of a decade of complete and utter failure from those opposite. At both the federal and New South Wales levels, coalition governments have failed us because, when they were in government, they showed little to no interest in addressing housing supply, and that is what has left us with this critical shortage.

Fortunately, we now have Labor governments at the federal and state levels in New South Wales that are laser focused on addressing housing affordability. In our first federal budget, the Treasurer announced our ambitious goal of building one million new homes over five years. Through the Housing Australia Future Fund, we are making the biggest investment in social and affordable housing in more than a decade. In our second federal budget, we boosted homelessness funding to state and territory governments and increased rent assistance for renters while putting rent reform on the agenda for National Cabinet. In our most recent budget we announced $6.2 billion in new investment to build more homes and support Australians. In this budget alone there has been more investment in housing than in all nine of the federal coalition budgets combined. That is how seriously we take this issue.

In Australia we like to build big things: the Snowy Hydro scheme, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I think that the next big project for us ought to be building more social and affordable housing. It will make a difference in people's lives. Finally we have a government that is willing to step up to the challenge—not only to step up to the challenge but to help people build more homes and to enable them to get rent and afford to buy.

Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The discussion has now concluded.