David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank Senator Lambie for highlighting the desperate need for more evidence based policies to promote wealth equality and affordable housing and education. Senator Lambie points to the growing social inequality in our country, and to this I would add the growing intergenerational inequality that we are seeing in this country. Too many people in this place are turning their backs on current and future generations and their needs—turning their backs on the evidence before us about what needs to change to shift the trajectory of this growing divide.

Let's start with housing. We're fast becoming a country where, as a young person, the only hope you have of owning a home one day is if you have wealthy parents, and we're becoming a country where more and more Australians—over 1.2 million households—are now living in rental stress. Over 116,000 people are homeless. More than 150,000 others are waiting for public housing, in most cases for years. We're becoming a country where here in the nation's capital, a jurisdiction that's constantly pointed to by others in this place as a wealthy, out-of-touch place, social workers from Canberra Hospital, just down the road from this place, are discharging women who are fleeing domestic violence onto the street because there is nowhere for them to go. At the same time, there are workers in that hospital who have to live at the caravan park because they can't afford rents.

Unfortunately, we have become a country where the major parties won't even have a conversation about tax reform when it comes to property. They won't even debate the merits of limiting negative gearing to, say, someone's first or second investment property or winding back capital gains tax discounts to 25 per cent instead of 50 per cent or even legislating a requirement for current and future governments to have a plan. Let's legislate a plan to deal with this housing crisis that is hurting so many Australians. As a parliament, we could agree on some common objectives, like making housing affordable or ending homelessness. This surely isn't something that's too big to ask, and I thank Senator Lambie for seconding the private senator's bill I introduced this week, which would do exactly that.

The government, as we've heard, is doing some good things. They are taking some steps, but they aren't going far enough. The Housing Australia Future Fund will deliver 30,000 new social and affordable homes over five years. It may sound like a lot of houses, but, if you hold it up against the current shortfall which is measured to be some 640,000, then 30,000 isn't even going to touch the sides. That's an indication of how much more ambitious we need to be.

The same is true of climate action, in relation to which I've also tabled a bill seeking to legislate a requirement to consider young people and future generations when we're making decisions. We have to be lifting our gaze beyond the next election. I see this constant focus on the next election, rather than on what is good for the country over the long term and on what's good for our kids and their kids.

Finally, on higher education, despite railing against the former government's job-ready graduates system, which jacked up the prices of some degrees by 90 per cent for some students, two years into the term of this government, we've seen nothing. We've seen no movement on job-ready graduates. At the time it was, rightly, called out by Labor in opposition for what it is: a totally unfair system that is saddling some students with a lifetime of debt. We also haven't seen them change the date of indexation for HECS, so we're still, effectively, charging people with a HECS debt interest on repayments that they've already made to the ATO. These are simple changes that you would have expected the Labor government to make because they're evidence based and because they deal with rising inequality, but we've seen nothing yet. So, while they've done some good stuff, there is so much more to do.