Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing that. If you want to fix the economy, maybe we could delay or defer the purchase of $24 billion worth of fighter jets that cannot be put in the air. Why don't we start with that? You have taken more than half a billion dollars out of this year's budget for the housing program. You have abolished the housing portfolio—so we no longer even have a housing minister—and you are now referring everything to the states without providing the funding for them to take up those obligations. We are 10 months in and there is no sign of your review.

There is no lack of innovation on display across policy, industry, advocates, researchers or even the political spectrum—from the innovative-community driven campaign in LA that has housed more than 100,000 homeless people in less than four years, to the shared equity strategies pursued by the WA government and the WA housing department, to the YMCA's recently unveiled 30,000 pound flat-pack homes in the UK, to the worthwhile initiatives introduced by the Rudd and Gillard governments that still struggle on today despite the stranglehold that the present government has imposed on the funding. We do not lack innovation and we do not lack money—as the Abbott government's $10 billion bender on unwanted urban freeways would tend to indicate. What we do lack is national leadership to shout from the overleveraged rooftops, 'Enough is enough!' Political indifference to the housing affordability crisis is killing people today in one of the wealthiest societies on earth.