Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

A tourist in Ireland asks a local how to get to Dublin. The Irishman replies, 'Sir, first of all, I wouldn't start from here.' It's an old joke, but it's a bit like these bills. That's because if you want to do something about fixing Australia's housing supply problems you wouldn't start with a set of bills like this. The Housing Australia Future Fund is a good idea done too small. It's like doing the best paint job on a car but only doing it on the passenger-side door. What you've done is great, but you haven't done enough of it.

To explain why, let's cast our minds back to how these bills looked when they first saw the light of day. We had a set of bills that gave $10 billion to the future fund to invest however it liked, and the money it made from the investment was to go to Housing Australia. Housing Australia would use that money to subsidise affordable housing to the tune of 30,000 homes over five years. That's what the bills did—at first. And who could say no to a change like that? It sounds great. Nobody in their right mind is going to oppose construction of new homes at a time when the only way out of a housing supply shortage is to build new homes. And if that counts as a personal reflection on the opposition, I will withdraw it in advance.

Housing is unaffordable because it's a product of the market, and markets work with supply and demand. You can't easily restrict demand for homes—I'm not sure how many people who are living in tents or their cars are doing it because they want to, but I suspect it's close to zero. Some members in this place have said that the best way to reduce demand is to cut our migration intake. While I don't want to focus on this proposal for too long, we're facing labour shortages in critical industries right across the country. You would be engineering the collapse of aged care, child care, primary care and agriculture by restricting workers from coming in to fill skill gaps. It would definitely reduce demand for housing because you'd have fewer people here, but I think starting a fire to fix a fire is a pretty novel approach to firefighting.

There are some tax things you could do to reduce demand for housing. You can tweak the treatment of investments or support for first home buyers or offer incentives for downsizing, but they are small change and going to result in either swapping renters for buyers and vice versa or swapping investors for first-home buyers. Those kinds of swaps might make sense and be worth looking at, but tax reforms like this are not going to reduce how many people want homes or change how they want them. You're not reducing the demand.

If you can't make housing more affordable through demand measures, you have to look at how you can boost supply, and here, thankfully, the options are pretty straightforward. If you want more of something, make more of something. If you want more homes, build more homes. These bills do just that. They provide a pathway to building more homes. The government deserves credit for having a crack at the housing crisis. What's disappointing about their approach is how they've seen a problem and come up with a solution that in no way meets its scale. It's like they have stumbled across a house fire and they're rushing to the kennel to make sure the family dog is safe. Will it make a difference? A little bit, yes—I'm sure Fido is happy with it—but it doesn't make a difference to the bigger picture. Fido isn't the only one who needs help. The problem is the fire and, when it comes to housing, make no mistake: we have a fire on our hands.

We have a shortfall of 600,000 affordable homes right now. It's growing every year. We need way more than 30,000 homes. What puts that into perspective is what the original Housing Australia Future Fund would have meant for Tasmania. When these bills were first introduced, there was a commitment to build 30,000 homes, but there was no commitment about where they were going to be built. There were no guarantees that the homes would be built anywhere. Based on population, Tasmania might have been looking at 600 or so homes over five years when we have a social housing waitlist of nearly 4½ thousand—a list full of people who can't afford to wait five years. So 600 homes wasn't going to cut it. That was my starting position on these bills. They weren't good enough for Tasmanians.

A few weeks after the bills were introduced, the latest census figures came out and showed that Tasmania's rate of homelessness was growing faster than any other state's or territory's by a mile. Tasmania's homelessness is growing by more than 10 times the national average, and we are on track to have an extra 1,100 people without a home in the next five years. If I'd passed the bills unamended, our rate of homelessness would be growing faster than the supply of homes. We're not gaining ground by doing that; we're just losing ground more slowly. If you want to outrun a bullet, you have to move faster than it's moving, so that's what I said we've got to do.

I said that I would support the bills if there was a concrete, guaranteed commitment that it would finance the construction of 1,200 homes in Tasmania over the next five years. That is 1,200 homes in the time we will have an extra 1,100 people needing on, and that was hard to pull off. That is what it takes to outrun a bullet. I was told by the government that it was impossible to guarantee Tasmania 1,200 homes. They said it couldn't be done. But I can be pretty stubborn, so I showed them how. Then I was told by the government that it shouldn't be done, and I showed them—very politely—why I disagreed. And then they agreed, and I thought, 'Finally, we can start to get moving.'

Things were looking brighter for those 4½ thousand Tasmanians on the social housing waitlist. Things were looking brighter for the Tasmanians who didn't qualify to be on that list but are still struggling with securing a place to call home. After my deal with the government for a guaranteed 1,200 homes for Tasmania, I happily thought that Tasmanians could breathe a bit easier—and then the Greens decided these figures needed a bit more sand.

They refused to support the bills on the grounds that it didn't go far enough—not enough money. That little dance lasted a while. Then they started complaining that it was financed through an investment into the Future Fund, which manages the money by investing it in things like shares. Someone pointed out that they were arguing both that the money shouldn't be invested and also that not enough money was being invested, so they started talking about how it didn't do enough of renters. You've got to give the Greens some credit: they're like bloodhounds when it comes to finding a reason to say the Labor Party isn't going far enough.

They stayed with this rental criticism for a while. They said they wanted rent freezes, and that sounds like a good idea if you're a renter. But if you're renting out your house and all of a sudden the value of renting out your house goes down, what do you think is going to happen? Airbnb is what's going to happen. Tasmania is full of Airbnbs. Practically every rental property gets converted into an Airbnb. And why wouldn't they be? Tourists are paying $500 to stay for a weekend. A family of four might have been paying that some amount per week to live in that property as a rental. A rent freeze would mean that the family's rent stays at $500, plus a few extra dollars if the government gives you permission. But your Airbnb prices aren't frozen. You can charge whatever you want.

Rent freezes will make Airbnbs more attractive. So, you'll end up getting more Airbnbs. I don't want Tasmania to end up like some towns in regional Australia that are full of Airbnbs for holidaymakers but the people who work in the shops, the cafes and the schools cannot afford to live there, because there's nowhere left to rent. Where's that family of four going to live if every potential rental property is instead converted into an Airbnb?

The Greens focused on rent during their negotiations with the government on the bills because the cost of renting is way too high. They are right to want to do something about it. But the big tragedy was that the thing they wanted to do wouldn't help—and the thing that would help, they didn't want to do. Housing is a market—supply and demand. Rent prices can't go down until supply goes up. Supply goes up when buildings go up. Blocking 30,000 homes from going up is not helping supply. The Greens were blocking affordable housing to make housing more affordable, and they voted with the opposition—who are really taking on that title like it's a second skin, time and time again. Every player in the sector came out and asked the Greens to support these bills. Every state and territory government asked the Greens to support these bills. And the Greens said no, because it didn't do enough for renters. Renters were the line in the sand—and I say 'were' because it looks like the tide has come in, and that line in the sand has gone.

The reason I'm giving this speech today specifically is because the Greens are supporting the bill without a rent freeze or a cap. And the future fund is still going to manage the investment. It's still gambling on the stock market—which is probably the most radical way you could describe buying shares in Coles and Qantas. What used to be a line in the sand is now just the sand. And while I say all this, I don't mean it to be nasty to the Greens, because I sincerely think they had good intentions, and I sincerely think they should be congratulated for a lot of what they did. They did manage to get an extra billion dollars in investment in affordable housing, which is terrific news. I think they did a great job. I think they were right to criticise the scale and ambitions of the bills. I think they were right to push the government to go harder, and I'm really happy they have decided to end this stalemate and support this legislation.

It's just frustrating that we've had 700 homes ready to go, to start building in Tassie right away, and they've had to wait an extra six months to get the ball rolling. But I don't want to be complaining about these bills passing later than I would have liked, because the bills will pass—better than before, and that's something to celebrate. These bills are better because they were fixed by the crossbench. The Greens have played an important part in that. And the commitment to 1,200 homes puts a floor under how many homes Tasmania will see built. It's almost doubled what we would have received without this guarantee. The mainland might not appreciate the difference for Tasmania between 600 homes and 1,200 homes, but let me put it like this. Those extra homes—just the extra homes—are enough to put a roof over the head of every Tasmanian who is sleeping rough tonight. That's what kind of difference this could make. These bills are a result of hard work that began years ago, before Labor even took up the idea.

I'm grateful to the boffins at the Grattan Institute who came up with this idea. I'm grateful to Labor for endorsing it as part of their election campaign. I'm grateful to the Greens for finally backing it. It's not where I would have started. But, for where we've ended up, I'm over the moon. This will mean so much for those who need it. I won't delay it a minute longer.