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

Right now, as I speak today, there is a crisis unfolding in my home state of Western Australia and right around the country. Tonight, approximately 9,000 Western Australians will experience a form of homelessness. Nearly 13 per cent of them are under the age of 12. It is a hard figure to hear, but it is not hard to figure out how we got here. This place, this parliament, whether it be controlled by the Liberal Party or the Labor Party, has participated in and actively promoted the commodification and the capitalisation of what should be, of what is, a fundamental human right. Make no mistake about it: no matter how much the corporations and the developers might tell you differently, housing is a human right. Government after government has enacted policy after policy, driving up prices and driving down availability, and refused point blank to invest in what is so desperately needed: building new social housing to meet the demand that governments themselves have created. We're not talking about policy failure here; we're talking about policies working as they were designed—driving up costs, driving down affordability, driving people into a public housing system with massive waiting lists. The result of these policies is a broken housing system in Australia.

In Western Australia there are currently 18,000 people on the social housing waiting list, with an average waiting time of over two years, and that's if—and only if—they are able to find a home at all. In a state that has grown by nearly 200,000 people in the last four years, there are 400 fewer housing properties in the public housing system than there were in 2018. I'll say that again: 200,000 more people in four years and yet we currently have 400 fewer homes than we did in 2018. At the current rate of investment and construction, it would take nearly 1,300 years to accommodate everyone on the social housing waiting list. To put that into perspective, that would take us to the year 3323. It is the definition of a grossly inadequate system. Not only is the government committed to doing nothing for the tens of thousands of people from Western Australia who need a safe and stable place to live; it is in fact intent on making the problem worse by implementing policies that see housing prices skyrocketing and rental properties becoming impossible to find or, indeed, afford.

In Perth the rental availability rate fell to 0.6 per cent. This is the lowest level it has been at since 1980. In rural Western Australia and regional Western Australia, the situation is even worse. Albany has a vacancy rate of 0.3 per cent. Kalgoorlie has a vacancy rate of 0.5 per cent. This has made it unreasonably difficult for renters, especially first-time renters, to find a place. A video last month showed a queue of over 100 people at a housing inspection session in Bentley. Even if you are lucky enough to find a place you can afford, you'll still be exposed to rental bidding and price gouging, which is absolutely endemic in the system. In the town of Katanning, for example, we've seen rental prices increase by nearly 50 per cent in the last 12 months.

These are all very worrying statistics, and behind them sit very real human experiences. There are stories like Chloe's, a woman in her 30s who, after being told that her lease would not be renewed, tried everything to find a new rental but could not do so in time. Chloe has been living in her van since October with her daughter, her two dogs and her two cats. Chloe has been on the social housing waiting list for two years. There are stories like Jack's, who, while overseas, was given six days notice that their landlord would try and raise rent in order to 'complete long-overdue rental improvements on the property'. They were forced to move all their belongings into the basement of their workplace and stay with friends because they simply could not find another place to rent in this broken system.

This fear of eviction, and of the housing crisis more broadly, is deep within people. The fear is that they will be thrown, as tenants, into a situation which places them in a toxic power imbalance, an imbalance that has led some landlords to embody the very worst parts of humanity in how they make an effort to save a few dollars, landlords who refuse to carry out basic maintenance or work because they know that a renter is more likely to be willing to suffer through bad conditions than risk being evicted.

In February, for instance, in Perth we had two heatwaves, with temperatures reaching into the high 30s and going only as low as the low 20s at night, yet there is no minimum standard that requires a landlord to keep heating and cooling under control in their property or to provide any type of climate control. There is no requirement in Western Australia during the summer for air-conditioning. There is no requirement in the winter for heating, no requirement for climate-resistant housing at all in the middle of the climate crisis and no requirement for anything as simple as insulation.

These conditions are not only the cause of discomfort and inconvenience, they pose a serious health risk and safety risk to people. People have shared with me their experience of getting heatstroke, simply from making dinner in their house while it is unsafely hot. So many renters are afraid to even make a request for such a basic thing because they are afraid it will lead them to being evicted on a no-grounds eviction, which is, by the way, still legal in the state of Western Australia. Renters are putting their health at risk because they are afraid that their landlord would rather make an extra 30 bucks a week than do the bare minimum to make their property safe.

It is these types of outrageous situations, created by this broken system, which is why the Greens are fighting to actually get outcomes for renters and for people needing social housing. It is for people like Chloe and Jack that we are working to make sure that Labor's plan in this space actually delivers what people need—a $5 billion investment in social housing, a national plan for a rent freeze, an increase in Commonwealth rental assistance and a billion dollars worth of investment in remote Aboriginal housing. These are the policies which this place must enact to create a reality of a home for everyone.