Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this extremely important issue. I am glad that Senator Carr has put this issue on the agenda again. One of the biggest problems facing low-income Australian households today is finding affordable, secure and appropriate housing. There are various definitions of affordable housing. I have looked up the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute definitions. They say there are a number of measures for defining affordability, but they use the 30-40 rule, a commonly used measure in housing research and policy. By this definition, housing is affordable when a low-income household—which they define as being in the bottom 40 per cent of the needs adjusted or equalised disposable income distribution—pays no more than 30 per cent of its gross household income on housing costs. Using the 30-40 rule, estimates for 2002-03 found that 862,000 Australian households experienced housing affordability problems—in other words, in housing stress.

Over a one- to two-year period, many of these households may be able to improve either their income or their housing cost circumstances to alleviate their housing stress. However, a third of households experience housing stress for more than two years. As ACOSS says:

The lack of affordable housing reflects a basic failure in the relationship between housing markets, incomes, employment, investment and the tax and welfare systems. Contributing further is the lack of a national policy framework within which government activity in the housing system can be directed and coordinated.

In other words, these are the areas where government should be involved: the tax and welfare systems and, of course, generating a national policy framework, which is sadly lacking in this country. I think it is fair to say that there is a looming national crisis in housing affordability. I think the benefits of investing in affordable housing, public housing, community housing, are manifold.

A recent Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report on the value of community and public housing articulated this. As I have pointed out in this place before, they demonstrated a very good base of statistics for a very good case for why public and community housing are so important. ABS research shows that the level of housing stress—which I defined earlier—for those renting privately or buying houses is very high with households in the bottom 20 per cent of incomes spending more than 60 per cent of their income on housing costs. The stock of social housing under the Commonwealth-state agreement has fallen 32 per cent in real terms from 1996, resulting in an 11 per cent fall in stock between 1996 and 2005. Over the last five years, the number of households assisted each year has fallen from nearly 40,000 in 2001 to less than 28,000 in 2004-05, a decline of more than 30 per cent.

While there has been some growth in the funding for the agreement over the next two years, this will be less than half the rate of inflation. This means that there is reduced funding for social housing in real terms. It will leave more than 200,000 social housing applicants wondering if they will ever have an affordable place to live. In its first report the Affordable Housing National Research Consortium suggests that, on present trends and in the absence of new policy measures to redress this situation, the number of stressed households will reach one million by 2020. Housing impacts on a person’s ability to find work, education and training. Regions and cities with jobs often have high housing prices and rental rates. Poor housing can also negatively impact on a person’s health and wellbeing.

I am particularly concerned about the housing situation facing Aboriginal people in Australia. This is rather topical, considering the land rights legislation that is currently being debated in this place. Tom Calma in his report on native title states that, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, $2.1 billion is required to address Indigenous housing needs. The statistics should scare everybody. It is going to take a long time to make up for the shortfall in Aboriginal housing. Many of us have seen the awful pictures on TV showing levels of overcrowding that non-Indigenous people would find totally unacceptable. I doubt they would be able to deal with it.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2005 released its report into Aboriginal housing needs entitled Indigenous housing needs 2005: a multi-measure needs model. In the report some very scary statistics are listed. For example, in all jurisdictions the rate of homelessness is much higher for Indigenous people than for non-Indigenous people. Rates vary in different jurisdictions but the average Indigenous homeless rate is 18 per 1,000, which is about 3.5 times the non-Indigenous homeless rate. Looking at overcrowding, the report found that 10 per cent of Indigenous households lived in overcrowded conditions. One in every three, or 34 per cent, of the Indigenous community housing sector is affected by overcrowding. Twenty-two per cent of Indigenous people live in overcrowded conditions across Australia—again, it varies between jurisdictions. The rate of overcrowding among Indigenous people was 953 per 10,000—six times the rate of overcrowding for non-Indigenous people.

If you look at housing affordability statistics for Aboriginal people, you see that, in 2001, 37 per cent of Indigenous households paid out more than 25 per cent of their income in rent. The proportion of households in affordability need varied by tenure type and was highest among households who were private renters, at 66 per cent, and lowest among those in Indigenous or mainstream community housing, at 16 per cent. Thirty-seven per cent of Indigenous households were affected by the affordability of housing, compared with 30 per cent of non-Indigenous households. If you look at statistics for dwelling conditions and connection to essential services, you see that many dwellings in discrete Indigenous communities have been found to be in need of repair or replacement. In 2001, 27 per cent of dwellings were in need of major repair or replacement. This is one of the major issues in Aboriginal communities. Even when Aboriginal communities can get access to housing, finding funds to be able to maintain their dwellings with is extremely difficult.

The extreme disadvantage faced by Indigenous Australians was also highlighted by the release in July last year of the Overcoming Indigenous disadvantage: key indicators 2005 report by the Productivity Commission. The report once again highlighted the growing gap between Indigenous people in this country and the rest of the Australian population in all its headline and strategic indicators. I remind this place again of the statement by the Chairman of the Productivity Commission, Gary Banks, in which he said:

It is distressingly apparent that many years of policy effort have not delivered desired outcomes; indeed in some important respects the circumstances of Indigenous people appear to have deteriorated or regressed. Worse than that, outcomes in the strategic areas identified as critical to overcoming disadvantage in the long term remain well short of what is needed.

If you go on further to look at other statistics, such as homeownership, you see that Australia has one of the OECD’s highest rates of homeownership, with the 2001 census showing 70 per cent of Australian households were living in fully owned or mortgaged dwellings. This is in stark contrast to the 14.6 per cent of Indigenous households in the Northern Territory that own a dwelling or have a mortgage on a dwelling. This is a scary statistic. Furthermore, the current projections for the rate of Indigenous population growth in remote areas indicate that this problem will continue to worsen. It is access to housing that is the issue here.

There are many different statistics available on housing affordability. I have done quite a bit of research and have found a range of different figures. They vary slightly, but the overall trend is the same—that is, access to affordable housing is getting more difficult in this country. There is an urgent need for the government to take increased responsibility and to take action to address this issue. It is telling that we do not have a minister for housing. We need a national strategy in this country, as was articulated by ACOSS. I understand they are becoming increasingly alarmed about access to affordable housing and what it means for our community. Very often, housing is available at high cost where jobs are, but jobs are not available near low-cost housing. People in those areas often have very limited access to transport. So, if people live where housing is more affordable, they often have great difficulty getting to the area of their employment.

Another issue that will be of growing concern as petrol prices rise is that people’s access from their homes to transport will be increasingly difficult. The work by Griffith University in this area is very illuminating. They looked at the impacts of increasing oil prices—whether it be through just increasing oil prices or the lack of availability of oil through peak oil—and they have identified areas where it will be extremely difficult for people to gain access to transport because adequate public transport is not available. These are low-income areas, so housing affordability will get even worse. Once the impact of higher petrol prices and peak oil start to kick in, we will have an even bigger crisis. As the Affordable Housing National Research Consortium suggested, unless we do something, this issue will get worse. The consortium thinks the number of households stressed—and that is households, so there will be more people—will be one million by the year 2020. There is a clear need for the government to start taking more responsibility for affordable housing—to look at the tax and welfare systems and to develop a national policy framework in which proper, appropriate decisions can be made to address this pressing issue and to deal with this national crisis.