Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is not my first speech. I will continue on from where I was interrupted by question time by going to the nature of the housing crisis which is gripping our nation and locking my generation out of the housing market altogether. There are currently over 200,000 applicants waiting on the Australian social housing waiting list across the country. Of those, 69,000 are classed as in great need, meaning that they are either homeless or experiencing great risk to their health and safety on the part of their housing situation. We have a situation today in Australia where the policy mechanisms which have been adopted by this chamber and the other place have worked to create a housing market in which it is now impossible for those particularly of my generation to think of home ownership as anything other than a distant dream.

It is, quite frankly, absurd and perverse that I, as a 23-year-old Australian and senator in this place, am one of the only people of my age who could now ever consider buying or purchasing my own home. This isn't in any way surprising, and it isn't, in many ways, new. The average cost, as a percentage of disposable household income, of the average home loan has risen from 32 per cent in 1988 to 134 per cent as of 2015. Rental costs have increased 44 per cent over that time period, and, unsurprisingly, home ownership among young people has dropped significantly over that same period.

It's very easy for us all to sit here and quote these facts and statistics in the abstract as though they don't have human consequences, but I know from firsthand experience that they do. There are over 10,000 people in my home state who will tonight go to sleep without a home. Of those 10,000, 42 per cent will be below the age of 25. In my local suburb of Rockingham and in the neighbouring suburb of Mandurah, over 200 people in each suburb will go to sleep on the streets. These people are treated as though they are not our fellow Australians. They are quite often treated as though they are lesser than the animals with which they sometimes sleep. They are moved on; they are shunned; they are treated as less-thans.

They do not feature often in our political debate, and I do not find that surprising. I have been in Canberra less than a week and yet I'm already under no illusion as to why it is that issues such as homelessness and poverty so infrequently make it onto the discussion paper in this place, except when the Greens bring them up. We are paid a couple of hundred bucks every day for being here. We are on one of the highest wages in the nation. We do not see, we do not know, we do not often interact with people who experience these things.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the legislation proposed by the government does little or nothing to address this fundamental issue. The reality is that the coalition government—which is so poorly represented in the chamber at the moment—upon coming into government, cut no less than $500 million from the homelessness sector under the guise of a budget emergency which we had to address lest the entire place burned down. It is quite funny to me that, subsequent to having to find that $500 million for the running of the nation, it was then able to find a further $500 million for a military exercise to follow the United States into a bombing campaign in Syria with no clear aim or objective or end date. Yet these are the decisions that we make in this place; these are the priorities of this chamber. You are confronted with the reality that your inability to act on this issue is causing people to die nightly on the streets of every single capital in this country.

It is within the power of this chamber to change that reality for the lives of tens of thousands of people and confront the vested interests, which so often seem to influence your decision-making processes to act in the common good, not just to tinker with negative gearing but to end it. It is within the power of this chamber to confront the scam of capital gains tax exemptions, where we—young people, workers, older Australians, mums and dads—subsidise a tax mechanism of which over 70 per cent of the profits go to the 10 per cent most wealthy households in the country. We could end that right now. We could inject billions of dollars into the affordable housing sector and into the community housing sector. We could establish, right now, a national rental standard so that nobody is forced into the situation where, if they are lucky enough to be able to rent a premises, that premises has a roof that leaks, no air conditioning or no floor. We could establish national tenancy rights standards so that tenants are always on an equal footing with landlords, and we could ensure that rental amounts are affordable for those who are faced with the need to pay them. The reality is that only 2.9 per cent of rental properties on the market right now are affordable and only 0.2 per cent of that number are affordable if you are on the Newstart payment. We could change this right now. The Greens would support any motion in this place to do so, and we back this legislation because at least it admits that the policies of this government are part of the problem—that homelessness is not inevitable and that it is not a reflection of a social or personal failing; it is a reflection of a policy failing, policies which have been passed through this chamber within my lifetime. We could do these things, but we do not. Instead, we sit here and we fiddle. We fiddle while people die on our streets.

I support this legislation. It spasms in the right direction, but it goes nowhere near as far as is needed. I would ask every senator in this chamber who does not sit with me on the Greens benches to reflect upon why they believe that serving the vested interests of those groups who lobby for the continuation of these policies, which do nothing but exacerbate this problem, is more important than serving the people who elected them to this chamber. Thank you.