Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do you want to know how much someone renting a beautiful two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Vienna pays? It's about $250 a week. Meanwhile, the average two-bedroom unit in a capital city in Australia is about $633 a week—if you're lucky. The difference is that that someone in Vienna is living in one of the over 60 per cent of apartments in Vienna either directly built by the government or provided by a community housing provider or co-op where rents are set at prices people can actually afford.

In Australia, property is dominated by banks and property developers who want to maximise profit. In Vienna, almost anyone can move into one of these apartments with little to no income limits. These apartments aren't built to maximise profit. They are high quality, well designed, and often integrate play spaces for children, rooftop gardens and other shared social spaces. Rather than just making them available to the lowest income in society, they are made available to a broad cross-section of Viennese society. Professors are living next door to teachers, cleaners, and people on income benefits. That means that the income generated from that scheme allows the city to invest in building more good-quality, well-designed housing. There is absolutely no reason why Australia can't adopt a similar scheme. That's exactly why the Greens have proposed that we establish a public developer to build affordable housing that people can afford.