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

I rise to speak to the Help to Buy Bill 2023, and I endorse the comments of my fellow Greens on this bill. Right now, the housing system in Australia is stacked in favour of property investors, banks and property developers, and this is not about a lack of ambition or optimism, as the previous speaker suggested; it's about the reality that faces people now, a reality completely different from my reality as a young person approaching the housing market decades ago and from our forebearers and what they had put together in the housing market. It is so different now. Just look at the tax concessions set to cost the public purse $176 billion over the next decade, firing up the housing demand and taking housing out of the realm of possibility for so many Australians who work diligently to save money every week and look at the possibility for them to own a house just drifting away into the future.

Let's look at the number of vacant properties that are left empty by developers to help drive up the price of housing. Housing policy in this country is geared towards pushing up housing prices, and the bill before us today is no different. It is more of the same. The Labor government may acknowledge that we are in the middle of a housing and rental crisis but their inaction and their inadequate and very poor policies speak louder than their words. We want to engage with Labor. We want to find a better way forward, a meaningful way of fixing the crisis, not a leg-up for a small number that will actually pour fuel on the fire rather than address the problem.

Across the country, millions of renters are struggling to keep their heads above water with house prices and mortgages only continuing to soar. The Help to Buy scheme is like throwing a bucket of water onto a house fire—