Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Housing is a human right. It's the cornerstone of a decent life. It's a cornerstone of safety, especially for women and children. In a wealthy country like ours, all Australians should have a roof over their heads—a roof that doesn't leak and that provides a home that's warm in winter and cool in summer. Housing should not be viewed as a vehicle for wealth creation. The treatment of housing as an investment vehicle, with massive tax discounts to enable the accumulation of wealth for some, has fed investment demand for housing that has driven up the price of homes and taken them out of the reach of low- and middle-income Australians.

In this wealthy country, we now have a generation who cannot afford to break into home ownership unless they are wealthy or have access to the bank of their parents. This is a generation so unlike my own and that of so many others in this place. They are a generation who already carry enormous debts for their higher education and even for their vocational education. They experience years, if not decades, of insecure work and stalled wages. They also face the extraordinary costs and consequences of a climate crisis that my generation did not face. In this context, affordable housing is so important. This means we must make housing purchase and rent affordable. Both are critical to a good life in this country, and both depend on increasing the supply of housing, especially affordable public housing, and capping rents.

I'm proud that the Greens have fought hard for nine months for a better response to our housing crisis. We took that policy to the last election and we have fought hard for it ever since. Our pressure has worked. We've held out because the problem is huge, serious and growing very rapidly. Secondly, we've held out because we can afford it. We're a country that's looking at providing tax cuts to the very wealthy at a cost of $313 billion over the next decade. We're a country that think we can afford $368 billion on submarines. A country that can spend these kinds of sums over coming decades can solve the problem of a housing crisis.

We Greens have won a series of very important things. First of all, this week, we've won a new billion dollars of direct, immediate investment in public and community housing, to be spent this year. On top of that is the $2 billion in the Social Housing Accelerator fund, taking the total sum to $3 billion for social and affordable home building. That will create thousands of homes for low-income renters and people seeking to buy homes. We've pushed to put the plight of renters on the national agenda, looking for action. Labor had a chance to make unlimited rent increases illegal, and they chose not to do it. This is the challenge that still lies ahead of us—to cap rents and to make it possible to afford rents at a moment when wages are not increasing at the rate of inflation. We need solutions into the future, which we Greens intend to fight for for renters.

Let's take a look at the challenges in my own state of South Australia. Here's why we need to fight very hard for a long-term solution on housing, especially for renters. In the June quarter this year, Adelaide experienced the largest annual rise in CPI of all Australian cities. The increase in rents was a primary driver of that extraordinary inflation in the city of Adelaide. Housing SA, our state's public housing authority, has a waiting list of 17,000 people, 24 per cent of whom are deemed to be in urgent need of shelter. They are very vulnerable to homelessness, and a growing proportion of people in this very wealthy state in this wealthy country find themselves without a home.

Over the last 12 months in South Australia, rental prices have increased by 12.5 per cent in the regions of our state and 12.2 per cent in Adelaide. I'm talking about three-bedroom homes. They've increased by 10.6 per cent in regional South Australia and 10.8 per cent for a two-bedroom home in Adelaide. Not only have rental prices in the state been outstripping inflation; the wages people use to pay their rent have been going backwards in real terms, making rent even more expensive.

Over the past 12 months, availability of rental properties has emerged as a clear crisis in our city and across our state. The number of properties in South Australia has decreased in all areas, and overall there was a 35 per cent decrease in properties available in regional South Australia. By contrast, our population has grown by 7.8 per cent in roughly the same period, so most regions see decreasing availability of rental properties while the population grows. This creates enormous challenges for businesses across rural South Australia and our regions and big towns, where we cannot accommodate essential services and workers and therefore cannot provide the services that those places need.

For those on very low incomes, rents in South Australia are unaffordable, meaning they have to spend more than 30 per cent of household income to keep a roof over their heads. A single person looking to rent a two-bedroom unit would need to spend 32 per cent of the minimum wage, 43 per cent of the age pension or over 60 per cent of the JobSeeker payment on rent. A single parent with two children, reliant on JobSeeker and with family tax benefit payments would need to spend more than 40 per cent of their income for a three-bedroom home in all regional areas in South Australia. For so many families, it's a choice between food and shelter.

Of the 36,000 renter households in regional South Australia, some 71 per cent were in the bottom 40 per cent of income, meaning that many of these renters are in severe housing stress, spending more than 30 per cent of their income on their rent and their housing.

Over the past few decades, the quality and availability of public housing has been eroded by successive governments as housing policies increasingly skewed toward the commercial interests of developers and investors, both landlords and speculators, rather than the needs of the increasing number of Australians who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. The result of this decades-long policy drift is over 122,000 homeless across Australia. Over 17,000 of them are children aged under 12 years. More and more people, including families, children and young people, are living in tents, cars, caravans, on the street or couch-surfing between friends and relatives. Homelessness disproportionately affects those who are most vulnerable. At the last census, almost 25,000 First Nations people were experiencing homelessness, which is 20 per cent of the homeless population. As the cost of living continues to increase, fuelled by the price-profit spiral, the fastest-growing group within the homeless population is women over the age of 55. In a 2021 study by La Trobe University, 23 per cent of young LGBTQIA+ people surveyed had experienced homelessness.

Solutions for our housing crisis demand action, particularly in relation to our most vulnerable citizens. The scale of the crisis for renters, for those who want to buy and for people without homes of any kind is huge. The proposals before us—the HAFF and the $3 billion on the table, resulting from pressure from the Greens—are not enough, but they are an important advance on what we had nine months ago. We need to fight on, and we will, for rent caps and for more public housing, but I point out that, without our efforts today—the work of Greens campaigners in cities and regions across our country and the actions within this parliament and place, pushing hard—we would not have the propositions that we have before us this evening. To all of those who said that we were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and should have settled earlier, you can see how standing up to an inadequate offer and staying at the negotiating table has delivered better outcomes. It's better than crumbs off the table. They are not enough. We need much larger and more solid solutions, and that's what we now see.

We intend to work much harder and in an ongoing way for the rights and conditions that face renters. Renters are on the march for real representation and effective solutions for the housing crisis. Many of their parents and communities are very concerned about what they see for the renters, especially the young people around them. We need to fix this housing crisis, and renters' voices need to be heard for long-term solutions. Housing is a human right. It deserves a genuine fix. We say to renters that we will back their voices and find those solutions going forward until those renters have safe, affordable houses to call home. In this wealthy country, we need much larger and more systematic solutions to the crisis that we now live in. Changing the housing system in Australia isn't easy, but we must do it. Housing must be treated as an essential service, a basis on which to have a job, a basis on which to raise a family and a place where you can be safe. It's an essential building block of a decent society and a decent life, and it's not a financial asset. We intend to keep up the pressure to this end, and Australians deserve no less.