Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for a nationwide rent freeze, given the biggest annual rent increases in fourteen years and rents growing seven times faster than wages in our capital cities.

There is nothing short of a full-blown rental crisis happening right now in Australia. In my home state of Tasmania, since 2016, the median rental rate in Hobart, where I live, has grown by 50 per cent. That is 50 per cent in six years. It is absolutely critical that we address this crisis in rental affordability, and in housing more broadly. If you are lucky enough to be able to rent a place, so many people cannot afford to pay their rent and where so many people cannot even find a place to rent because vacancy rates are too low.

The explosion in rental costs and the ensuing rental crisis represents a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and, in general terms, from the young to the older. It is not by accident and not just bad luck by the tenants; this has been done and driven deliberately by successive Liberal and Labor governments. The class war by property owners and the banks has been going on for a long time, and, make no mistake, the tenants are losing the war. The Labor Party and the Liberal Party have backed in landlords and they have backed in the banks. They have backed them in to continue to make massive profits and they have done that by ensuring that the return for the banks and the return for the landlords is guaranteed by the taxpayer.

The great Australian dream is no longer that you can one day own a home of your own. The great Australian dream today is owning a property portfolio, with tenants who pay your income and who pay, ultimately, for your assets. So if you own a house and it is rented out, even though you may be renting it out for a loss, that loss is subsidised through tax breaks for you, paid for by the taxpayers. What that means, tragically, is that not only do tenants pay off their landlords was mortgage, they pay the tax that the landlords don't. On what planet is that fair or reasonable? It is an absolute scam, and the scammers are the political parties in this place that deliver on those tax breaks. In real terms, what that means for people on the ground is they are skipping meals, they are not paying power bills and they are not paying for much-needed medicine, just to keep a roof over their heads. In a country where a landlord can own 283 rental properties and still complain about the prospect of a freeze in rents, this is an obscenity. Enough is enough.

It is time to cap rents. We should do it for two years and then peg them to the CPI thereafter. That is just the start. We should scrap the capital gains tax discount, we should end negative gearing and we should actually start building enough homes so that everyone can have a home to live in. Most importantly, we need to shatter the class gap between those who own housing and those who don't.