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

Mr Acting Deputy President, there is a lot of noise in here, from people who should know better.

Looking around on Christmas Eve for more things to shut down, the government cut all funding for Homelessness Australia, National Shelter and the Community Housing Federation of Australia. That is kind of ironic, because these are the very people who could have helped Mr Hockey come up with something intelligent to say about housing affordability, but they cannot take his call because he closed them down.

So, if Mr Hockey actually cares about helping young people into affordable housing, rather than ransacking their retirement savings, there are many better ways of going about it.

Nothing is more important than having a place to call home. Getting over the idea that homeownership is the be-all and end-all. I think that is quite an important psychological thing for us to get through, for Australians to get through and for policymakers to get through. One-third of the nation's householders are renters. Many of them, young people, are priced permanently out of the housing market. They may well be renters for life, and that is something we have to get across.

Renters have to be seen not as second-class citizens. And that is going to be difficult for those on the other side of the chamber to accommodate, because many of them, we know, are investors. You might own six houses, but you have priced first home owners out of the market. There are people in that one-third of Australian householders who are renters and will probably be renters for their entire lives, whether they want to buy a property or not. We have to provide tenure stability and tenure security for people who are renters, because the prospect of ever buying a home is well and truly out of reach for so many people.

The most urgent thing we need to deal with is homelessness: 100,000 Australians are homeless and 10,000 are sleeping rough tonight—and that is probably an underestimation, so don't you dare abolish the census. Nonetheless, at least 10,000 Australians will sleep out tonight, when the rest of us have all gone home.

The Australian Greens have a homelessness action plan, which I put forward to Mr Hockey and all to members of this chamber on the basis that we are willing to negotiate on any of these proposals. Senator Day knows a fair bit about this sector. The Labor Party initiated some pretty smart stuff when they were in government. We are calling for the coalition to come to the table to talk. (Time expired)