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

The Greens will support Senator Pocock's motion, but I want to be clear that, from the Greens viewpoint, migrants and migration should never be used as a scapegoat for successive governments' failure to ensure that everyone in this country has a home. Neither should migrants or migration be used as an excuse for the fact that not everyone in this country has a place to call a home. This government and successive governments from the neo-liberal parties in this place have abjectly failed to address the plight of the hundreds of thousands, arguably millions, of Australians who have been crushed under the oppressive weight of spiking house prices and spiralling rents. The policies of the Labor and Liberal parties in this place result in multiple billions of dollars every year being diverted out of the public purse into the already overflowing pockets of property speculators and property investors. That is via mechanisms such as those Senator Ayres just referred to—negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

I don't have time to address the absurdity of Senator Ayres's argument in favour of keeping those massive multiple billions of dollars' worth of concessions to property speculators while so many thousands of Australians are sleeping rough on the street because I want to talk here about the Labor Party's so-called solution to the housing crisis, the Help to Buy scheme, which is a half-hearted band-aid over a gaping wound. Incrementalism is not going to solve the problem. The Housing Australia Future Fund was incrementalism until the Greens used their balance of power in the Senate to get $3 billion extra, and we are prepared to do the same on the Help to Buy scheme.