Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In recognition of national Homelessness Week, I would like to share a story from someone who contacted my office who is part of a growing cohort of homeless people. Sadly, this story is about just one of the 122,000 people across Australia who experience homelessness on any given night. The constituent, who wishes to remain anonymous, wants the Senate to hear about how she was forced into insecure housing due to meagre income support payments which cannot keep up with skyrocketing rental costs. She said:

I'm currently 45 years old, on the Disability Support Pension with chronic health issues and severe mental health issues. I'm currently homeless. Due to my very limited income, it is near impossible for me to find another rental. I was evicted 6 months ago from my previous rental of 9 years because the real estate wanted to double the rent and couldn't do so with me in the property. I'm currently staying in a caravan park which is dangerous and very unsafe for my health paying $350 per week with no cooking facilities, no heating, and no in-home bathroom facilities. My physical health and mental health have never been so bad. I'm also now separated from my carer and my family members, again. It's dangerous to my health, as there isn't enough room here.

Homelessness means more than sleeping without a roof over your head. It can mean finding refuge in crisis accommodation, sleeping in a car or relying on the kindness of friends to get by. The housing crisis and rising financial stress are pushing more than 1,600 people into homelessness each month as demand for shelter soars. According to Homelessness Australia, women and children make up 74 per cent of those accessing services. Recently, we've seen more than 80 housing organisations calling on the federal government to limit rent increases and improve renters' rights. The government must put a billion dollars on the table at National Cabinet to coordinate a national freeze and cap on rent increases and agree to spend $2.5 billion at least per year on public and affordable housing.

When addressing the housing crisis, income support payments must be part of the conversation. More than three million people in Australia are living in poverty, barely able to keep up with the cost of food, medicine and housing in a cost-of-living crisis. The income support payments they receive do not match the surging rent costs and the skyrocketing costs of living. The $4-a-day increase to JobSeeker last week just did not cut it. Housing security and social security are fundamental rights. It is time for Labor to stop playing politics with poverty. It is time to end homelessness for good.

Which extreme heat record, which hottest ocean temperature record or which record on the smallest extent of sea ice should I focus on tonight? A month ago, we experienced the earth's hottest days in over 100,000 years. It is 'global boiling', in the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. There is zero doubt that we are in a climate crisis. We may have passed climate tipping points that are going to lead to massive upheavals in life as we know it on our small, blue-green planet. Heating is causing the breakdown of ocean and air circulation—currents that have been in place for tens of thousands of years. Heating is causing the thawing of Arctic permafrost and releasing vast amounts of methane. Heating is causing massive forest fires, turning forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources. People who understand the science are in despair as people in this place pat themselves on the back for the excellent work we're doing as we sit on a runaway train that's hurtling towards a broken bridge, with brakes that don't work. 'Don't worry,' they say, 'We've managed to reduce the speed of the train from 300 kilometres an hour to 150 kilometres an hour. All good! Have another glass of bubbly!'

In my first speech, I said that I hoped it would be during my time in this place that Australia turned the corner and legislated to begin the shift to a zero-carbon, safe-climate economy. Nine years on, the lack of progress is more than frustrating. It is hard not to feel despair.

Every day in this place we are surrounded by shills for the fossil fuel industry spruiking the opening up of new coal and gas mines that will collectively cook the planet. On the same day we had paediatricians, psychiatrists, family doctors and First Nations peoples visit this place, pleading for the massively polluting, heritage destroying, Beetaloo basin carbon bomb to not go ahead, we had the leader of the government in this place blithely telling us, 'Gas is a transitional fuel and the carbon pollution from outside Australia when this gas is burnt doesn't count, so don't worry.' I don't understand which bit about the crisis Labor, Liberal and Nationals politicians don't get. Are they blind to the devastating fires just over the horizon, or are they just praying that the wind is going to suddenly turn and we will be safe? Or do they really believe we're going to fix the brakes on the train just before we plunge over the edge? Or do they really believe their own deluded selves: 'We're doing the best we can'; 'It's better we are in government than the other side'; 'It really doesn't matter what we do in Australia because of China'? Besides, their mates in the fossil fuel industries are making a motza out of expanding coal and gas.

Australia is the biggest exporter of gas and the second-biggest exporter of coal. We are a petrostate. If we got out of coal and gas it would make a huge difference to global carbon pollution. We have the power to really make a difference. Maybe the deniers can't imagine the devastation or that things could possibly go that wrong, that we could have vast swathes of Australia too hot to survive in or huge extents of our coastal cities and beloved beaches underwater, that the climate of our wheat growing areas will become like the climate of the central deserts, that there will be billions of refugees from around the world looking for a home, or the inevitable wars when disputes intensify between countries over land, water and food supplies. Do they just wash their hands and say, 'Oh well, stuff happens and we won't be around then, so why worry'?

There are plenty of places to get a glimpse of this dystopia that we are bequeathing to young people alive today. We've got people still living in tents two years on after the devastating floods in northern New South Wales. We've got the fire ravaged communities of Greece and the more than 1,000 fires currently burning across Canada overwhelmingly affecting First Nations communities. We've had the loss of thousands of lives in Peru in the past three to four decades, from glacial lake outburst floods, as the country has lost up to 50 per cent of its glacial ice. These unnatural disasters are only going to continue to get worse and to impact more people. What is it going to take for us to take stock and realise our addiction to coal, gas and oil is killing us and has to stop?

I don't want this speech to be all gloom and despair; it's a call for action. The majority of Australians don't want a cooked planet. They would much prefer that we were global leaders in helping to pull humanity back from the brink. What do we need to do? We have to make our democracy work for us. The current crop of Labor, Liberal and Nationals parliamentarians have their heads in the sand—some deeper than others, but they've all got sand in their ears. They are not listening. They are not acting. They have to go. I urge people to join me and join the movement to chuck them out. We need a government that is committed to action on the scale required—a government which will listen to the science, listen to the UN, listen to the peoples of the world and listen to the web of life that we share this planet with. We need a government that is committed to no new coal and gas and to making that shift to that zero carbon future as urgently as we possibly can. I have spent the last 30 years working with others to build the Greens to be part of that government. We need action. We need a government of people that will listen. We need Greens in government. We need people who are not climate denialists in government. The future will either be green or not at all.