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

or taking a spoon to a knife fight, as my colleague just said. As we heard further from Senator Hanson-Young, it is a scheme that will help the 0.2 per cent of people lucky to get access to it but will deliver nothing to the 99.8 per cent for whom it will make things worse by driving up prices even further.

This bill was taken to a Senate inquiry where a lot of expert evidence was given that this will push up house prices. My colleague Senator Waters pointed to some of it. Professor John Quiggin, professor of economics at the University of Queensland, said:

These schemes have been around forever, but the money is eventually capitalised into house prices, so the beneficiaries gain at the expense of everyone else.

Senior economist Matt Grudnoff said:

The problem with these kinds of policies is that they simply increase demand for housing, and this increases the price of housing. The result is that it makes housing less affordable.

We need to be taking real steps to address the housing and rental crisis, not tinkering and not making the problem worse. Two-thirds of people in Australia are in housing stress according to a report from Everybody's Home. That means they are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. Housing affordability is worsening, hurting those paying off their mortgages, those saving for deposit, renters and people who can't afford to put a roof over their heads. Affordable rentals for households on the minimum wage have decreased 81 per cent over the last five years. According to the ABS, rents have increased at nearly double the rate of wages over the last year alone, putting millions of renters under significant financial stress and making it impossible for many to ever save enough to buy a home in the first place. This is pushing more people into homelessness.

The homeless rate in Australia, to our great shame, remains amongst the highest in OECD countries. It increased by five per cent between 2016 and 2021. That's an additional 6,000 people sleeping rough—sleeping outside and denied a basic human right of shelter. The only way we're going to solve this crisis is if the government steps in and starts building hundreds of thousands of homes itself. We want to work with Labor to get that kind of solution underway, and we don't want to do it by fuelling demand through policies that don't touch the sides.

Labor's policies will not address the depth of the crisis that we are facing. Help to Buy is a demand-side housing policy. It enables people to pay more for housing than they otherwise would be able to afford, and this guarantees a steady flow of capital into the housing market with limited supply. Inevitably, that pushes up prices. This is economics 101. Most Australians do not benefit from housing policies like this. In fact, only 0.2 per cent of Australians will be eligible for this scheme. So this scheme will actually make people worse off: the new home buyer, paying more for housing and being saddled with an impossible amount of debt; people trying to enter the housing market and finding the start line further and further out of reach, taking more and more time to save for a deposit; and those renting, on the verge of homelessness or homeless already, who face greater costs for housing.

The key group that benefits is investors. They rely on the rapid increase in house prices to ensure a return that's quick. They turn around their investments quickly and reap the benefits. The coalition loves demand-side solutions like this too. Just look at the first home buyer grant and the coalition's HomeBuilder scheme. These policies do not improve housing affordability for the vast number of Australians locked out of, or struggling with the cost of, housing. Demand-side solutions drive up prices and push the cost of housing out of reach for millions of Australians. Housing affordability is a huge problem affecting millions—in particular, women, young people, single parents, the unemployed, older renters, young renters and people with disabilities. The issues are widespread and big. Making housing affordable for all Australians will require much more comprehensive reform than we see in this bill.

Housing costs in my home state of South Australia are no different to the national picture and, in some cases, are much worse. Over the 14 years to 2020, Anglicare SA recorded a staggering 99 per cent increase in rental stress across South Australia. According to a recent Anglicare report, a single person on a parenting benefit living in South Australia, even when they are willing to share, could not afford any of the 1,600 properties advertised for rent—not one. Even for a working couple on minimum wage, 85 per cent of the rentals in Adelaide would be unaffordable. Rents in Adelaide are now increasing faster than anywhere else in Australia, with a 60 per cent increase over the last four years.

As South Australia's social housing stock has declined over the past decade or so, there has been a corresponding increase in homelessness. I see evidence of this every time I take a walk in the South Parklands, as I did on Saturday. The growing number of bright blue tents brings home the reality that ordinary South Australians are now faced with skyrocketing rents and unaffordable mortgage payments, forcing too many onto the streets, into the parklands and sleeping in their cars. It's a frightening prospect to lose your home, but we're seeing more and more South Australians slipping through the net. Over 184,000 families are on public housing waiting lists nationwide, and there are 4,000-odd in South Australia. This is pushing those on low incomes into homelessness, and we need comprehensive solutions, not bandaids that make the problem worse.

The rise in Adelaide house prices is more than double the national average, while repayments on a median dwelling have increased by almost $2,000 a month since 2022. It is beyond contention that housing tax concessions, including negative gearing and capital gains tax, are pushing house prices ever higher and out of reach of the most common occupations in Australia. If a primary school teacher began saving for a home deposit today it would take until 2036 to save a 20 per cent deposit on a median priced home. If a full-time childcare worker took out a home loan today they would need to spend 92 per cent of their income on repayments, assuming an 8.8 per cent interest rate. And a nurse would have to spend 50 per cent of their income servicing a home loan. It really should not be this hard.

Labor's so-called plan to tackle the housing crisis is to rely on profit-hungry developers to build expensive homes that too few can afford and to give billions of dollars in tax handouts to property investors, which deny millions of renters the chance to buy a home. On the other hand, we in the Greens have a comprehensive plan to tackle the housing crisis: capping rent increases, scrapping the tax handouts for property investors that go to so many on high incomes, and investing billions in building hundreds of thousands of good-quality homes to be sold and rented at prices that Australians can afford.

Investor housing tax concessions set to cost $176 billion over the next decade are helping to push housing prices up in capital cities. They've gone up by 34 per cent since 2020. These handouts are $176 billion worth of fuel that Labor is pouring on the raging fire that is Australia's housing crisis. Until Labor scraps them, we will never get this crisis under control. The reality is that we'll tackle the crisis until we phase out that negative gearing, the capital gains discount and the massive tax handouts for property investors. With the money saved from phasing out those tax handouts we could fully fund the Greens' plan to establish a public property developer to build 610,000 good-quality homes to be sold and rented at below-market prices. This would save an average renter who is participating in the program $5,200 in rent annually and the average first home buyer $260,000 on the price of a home. Our policy would transform the lives of millions of people.

But what about those who can't afford to buy a home? Across this country there are seven million renters who are in precarious renting arrangements. They are unable to push back against unfair rent hikes and dodgy landlords and agents who don't do basic repairs. The system is stacked against renters, and they need someone in their corner to fight for them. That's why we want to establish a national renters protection authority to enforce national tenancy standards and establish a national renters protection structure. It will have the power to independently investigate breaches of rental law, fine individual landlords and real estate agents for breaching renters' rights and refer serious offenders for prosecution in states and territories. Along with proactive investigations targeted at compliance with new rent caps and rights to lease renewal on minimum standards, that authority would be the first port of call for renters nationwide and would be a major assistance to those who are renting. Right now, around most of Australia, there is zero protection against unlimited rent increases and nothing to stop renters from being forced to move every year without warning.

Labor are the party of property investors and private developers, and we are standing for renters and first home buyers and are asking Labor to listen to our proposal to reconsider a plan that doesn't meet the crisis as we face it. We need to do so much better. We are a wealthy country and we can put a roof over everyone's head in our nation. We can enforce rent caps and freeze rents. Australian renters are insecure and powerless compared with those in many other countries, and we need to improve protections for renters rights.

Let's face it, developers will always put profit before social service, so we must agree that there is a level of market failure right now and we must have the full and comprehensive solutions that deal with it. Government policy that drives up house prices is a choice. It's the wrong choice. It's not one we in the Greens intend to make. Housing should be a basic social right, not a source of wealth accumulation. We can put a roof over everyone's head, and that should be the goal of housing policy in Australia.