Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In May of this year, a young diabetic woman and her partner ducked into the undergrowth at Lake Richmond in the southern suburbs of Perth, in search of a few hours of undisturbed sleep in the tent that was their only home. Like so many of Australia's renters, she lost her rental home because the owners wanted to sell it. She was turfed out and was unable to find somewhere else she could afford. So she was forced to sleep rough while she searched. By morning she was dead. Carried off during the night in a diabetic coma, her distraught companion was unable to revive her by the light of day. Dropped off the bottom rung of one of the least affordable housing markets in the world, beyond the reach of overstretched welfare agencies, unseen by government departments and irrelevant to the distant skirmishes of contending political parties, diabetes did not kill this young woman homelessness did.

The Australian housing sector is an uneasy hybrid of debt-fuelled market forces underlaid by eroding foundations of state public housing and ad hoc cash payments to those most in need. Roughly a third of Australian homes are owned outright by those who occupy them. Another third are paying down mortgages. The remaining third are renters. Only a tiny slice of the Australian housing market is taken up with public housing or other forms of supported accommodation. Deliberate government policy over two decades has shaped a market almost unique in the world: a nation of landlords bidding up the price of real estate in the hope of building an asset base for retirement and a nation of renters helping pay off the mortgages of those who got the jump on them. The twin engines of capital gains tax exemptions and negative gearing, worth $4 billion a year to the Commonwealth budget, have turned human shelters into tax shelters, allowing the suitably diligent to convert their progressively taxed income into lightly taxed assets in the form of rental accommodation. But what good is an asset unless it appreciates in value?

Forced ever upwards by population growth, restricted supply of developable land and repetitively brazen industry hype, the cost of housing—to rent or to buy—has vastly outstripped wages growth and the CPI since around 1998. Housing has been transformed, quite deliberately, from a human right into just another asset class, appreciating year on year even as state governments have sold down public housing and cast ever larger numbers of people into the teeth of an uncaring market.

Commonwealth Rent Assistance now costs nearly $4 billion a year and, while patently inadequate for those 1.1 million individuals and families who rely on it, it is nonetheless a symptom of a broken system rather than any kind of cure. Credit where it is due: in the aftermath of the 2007 election, the Rudd government set about rebalancing the scales, not through fundamental tax reform, which was considered too radioactive to handle, but through streamlining funding arrangements with the states, a white paper with the bold target to halve homelessness by 2020, and subsequent increases in homelessness funding. We also saw the introduction of the National Rental Affordability Scheme to help increase supply.

In acknowledging the Rudd government, I also want to acknowledge those in the housing affordability sector, in the non-government sector and those advocates and researchers who provided the raw material that was given to that parliament to work with. When the world's financial system went into cardiac arrest in 2008, one of the great acknowledged success stories of the stimulus package that kept Australia out of recession was the $5.6 billion spend on social housing, enough for almost 20,000 new homes, most of it auspiced by not-for-profit providers and state public housing authorities. It hardly made a dent in the spiralling waiting lists of more than 250,000 families, but it was a shot in the arm desperately needed in a sector that had been utterly neglected under the Howard government.

One of the things that we observed occurring was that, as the money was flowing in from the Commonwealth, the states were flogging off run-down public housing stock at the same time. As it happened, the rising tide of property speculation, tax carve-outs, low interest rates and a booming population continued to swamp these worthwhile initiatives. The 2011 census recorded nearly 105,000 homeless Australians, almost certainly a significant undercount. That catches everyone from those in chronic overcrowding on Aboriginal communities to precarious couch surfing and families sleeping in their cars—all the way to one woman's lonely point of departure on the shores of Lake Richmond.

On census night in 2011, there were an estimated 26,743 Aboriginal people experiencing homelessness, roughly two per cent of the Australian population and 28 per cent of the Australian homeless population. What an utter disgrace. In 2011, Indigenous households were also about half as likely as other Australian households to own their own home. They were three times as likely as other Australian households to be living in situations of overcrowding and six times as likely to live in social housing. An estimated 31 per cent of Aboriginal households were living in social housing in 2013. For the benefit of senators, these statistics that I have just put to the chamber are all cited by three studies produced by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and released today. This is one of the expert bodies that the Abbott government has defunded. Taking the expert bodies out of the picture removes such information as we do have about the degree and the extremity of the housing affordability and homelessness emergency in our country today.   

In a budget estimates hearing on 5 June, my questions as to whether or not the Abbott government even recognised the existence of the housing affordability crisis were met with robotic and embarrassingly repetitive unrelated talking points. Had the government modelled any estimates of the additional numbers of people that its hardline budget would push into homelessness? Same glazed response. Does the government have a plan? Does it intend to have a plan? Ten months in, the Abbott government's housing review has not even started. It has no terms of reference, no time line, no reporting date and there is no reviewer appointed to undertake the review.

In truth, the Abbott government's 2014-15 budget makes very clear the vision that it has for housing and homelessness in Australia. It provides a clinical and practical blueprint for a massive increase in the numbers of Australian people forced into homelessness. It will achieve this through changes to welfare. In the same budget estimates session, my colleague Senator Rachel Siewert was able to determine that up to 60,000 people may be forced to wait six months for payments, with nothing at all. Or the government will achieve this objective of forcing more people into homelessness more directly by simply axing the capital budget, worth $44 million, from the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, which was being used to build homelessness shelters and emergency supported accommodation. At the same time, the National Rental Affordability Scheme has been axed, which takes 12,000 new dwellings off the table. The National Housing Supply Council and the Prime Minister's Council on Homelessness have been junked under the slogan of 'cutting red tape', which in reality destroys our nation's most eminent housing research and supply expertise. Slow clap. Well done. This is where we have come to.

It is not that there are no solutions on the table. I gratefully acknowledge the help and support of some of those same researchers and advocates who informed the 2007 parliament and the Labor Party's worthwhile initiatives on housing and homelessness. Last year, they also assisted us in developing a national housing affordability strategy. Last year the Greens put forward a nine-part national housing affordability plan. This included a costed plan to double existing services and provide shelter to every rough sleeper—everyone sleeping in parks and in doorways or living in their cars—by the year 2020. If you are interested, on the government benches, it was costed at around $900 million per year. At the moment, 62 per cent of people fronting for homelessness support and emergency crisis accommodation are turned away, back into the street. That is a scandal. We proposed a major increase in public and community housing supply, enough to halve the waiting list within a decade. At the moment, there are nearly a quarter of a million Australians on that waiting list. In Melbourne, one applicant had to wait more than 18 years for somewhere to live. In New South Wales, the waiting list is anywhere from two to 10 years depending on your location.

We advanced a renters rights package to rebalance the scales and introduce a measured but well overdue national approach to the rental market. Did you know that there are national standards for the manufacture of plastic chairs but not for rental properties? We endorsed five years worth of work by AHURI on Housing Affordability Supply Bonds as a safe harbour for affordable housing investors—either institutional investors or mums and dads who want to park some of their savings in housing affordability but do not want the hassle of maintenance and looking after tenancies. We proposed an immediate audit and convert-to-rent program for the extraordinary amount of vacant space in our cities and towns. With the amount of vacant space we have in our cities and towns, what a scandal it is that we have people dying of homelessness!

Our affordability platform provided a roadmap to build more than 200,000 new affordable homes over the next decade—and we showed in detail how we propose to pay for it. By setting aside a substantial quota for fast-build modular housing we can kick start the nation's traumatised manufacturing sector while delivering rapid installation of environmentally sustainable dwellings—and also, I should add, a new market and customer for the struggling timber towns in the south-west of WA and, no doubt, in Tassie and the south-eastern states.

I am looking forward to a Senate inquiry into housing affordability, co-sponsored by the Labor Party and the Australian Greens, which in forthcoming hearings will directly confront taboo questions such as the tax treatment of housing. We will be looking for practical reform options. During this inquiry we will be travelling around the country to hear from homeless people, from housing affordability experts, from researchers—from those who have been frozen out by the Abbott government's pig-headed approach to expert views and independent experts.

We have a plan on the table for housing affordability. What does the government have? Have you got anything at all? I would happily take an interjection from government senators—who are avoiding eye contact at the moment—if you have the faintest idea what you are going to do about the housing affordability emergency. Not a peep! You have no plan. In fact, you are reversing away as fast as you can from the people most in need and a housing market so broken it kills people.

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When we fix the economy there will be solutions.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing that. If you want to fix the economy, maybe we could delay or defer the purchase of $24 billion worth of fighter jets that cannot be put in the air. Why don't we start with that? You have taken more than half a billion dollars out of this year's budget for the housing program. You have abolished the housing portfolio—so we no longer even have a housing minister—and you are now referring everything to the states without providing the funding for them to take up those obligations. We are 10 months in and there is no sign of your review.

There is no lack of innovation on display across policy, industry, advocates, researchers or even the political spectrum—from the innovative-community driven campaign in LA that has housed more than 100,000 homeless people in less than four years, to the shared equity strategies pursued by the WA government and the WA housing department, to the YMCA's recently unveiled 30,000 pound flat-pack homes in the UK, to the worthwhile initiatives introduced by the Rudd and Gillard governments that still struggle on today despite the stranglehold that the present government has imposed on the funding. We do not lack innovation and we do not lack money—as the Abbott government's $10 billion bender on unwanted urban freeways would tend to indicate. What we do lack is national leadership to shout from the overleveraged rooftops, 'Enough is enough!' Political indifference to the housing affordability crisis is killing people today in one of the wealthiest societies on earth.