Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is not my first speech. I will continue on from where I was interrupted by question time by going to the nature of the housing crisis which is gripping our nation and locking my generation out of the housing market altogether. There are currently over 200,000 applicants waiting on the Australian social housing waiting list across the country. Of those, 69,000 are classed as in great need, meaning that they are either homeless or experiencing great risk to their health and safety on the part of their housing situation. We have a situation today in Australia where the policy mechanisms which have been adopted by this chamber and the other place have worked to create a housing market in which it is now impossible for those particularly of my generation to think of home ownership as anything other than a distant dream.

It is, quite frankly, absurd and perverse that I, as a 23-year-old Australian and senator in this place, am one of the only people of my age who could now ever consider buying or purchasing my own home. This isn't in any way surprising, and it isn't, in many ways, new. The average cost, as a percentage of disposable household income, of the average home loan has risen from 32 per cent in 1988 to 134 per cent as of 2015. Rental costs have increased 44 per cent over that time period, and, unsurprisingly, home ownership among young people has dropped significantly over that same period.

It's very easy for us all to sit here and quote these facts and statistics in the abstract as though they don't have human consequences, but I know from firsthand experience that they do. There are over 10,000 people in my home state who will tonight go to sleep without a home. Of those 10,000, 42 per cent will be below the age of 25. In my local suburb of Rockingham and in the neighbouring suburb of Mandurah, over 200 people in each suburb will go to sleep on the streets. These people are treated as though they are not our fellow Australians. They are quite often treated as though they are lesser than the animals with which they sometimes sleep. They are moved on; they are shunned; they are treated as less-thans.

They do not feature often in our political debate, and I do not find that surprising. I have been in Canberra less than a week and yet I'm already under no illusion as to why it is that issues such as homelessness and poverty so infrequently make it onto the discussion paper in this place, except when the Greens bring them up. We are paid a couple of hundred bucks every day for being here. We are on one of the highest wages in the nation. We do not see, we do not know, we do not often interact with people who experience these things.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the legislation proposed by the government does little or nothing to address this fundamental issue. The reality is that the coalition government—which is so poorly represented in the chamber at the moment—upon coming into government, cut no less than $500 million from the homelessness sector under the guise of a budget emergency which we had to address lest the entire place burned down. It is quite funny to me that, subsequent to having to find that $500 million for the running of the nation, it was then able to find a further $500 million for a military exercise to follow the United States into a bombing campaign in Syria with no clear aim or objective or end date. Yet these are the decisions that we make in this place; these are the priorities of this chamber. You are confronted with the reality that your inability to act on this issue is causing people to die nightly on the streets of every single capital in this country.

It is within the power of this chamber to change that reality for the lives of tens of thousands of people and confront the vested interests, which so often seem to influence your decision-making processes to act in the common good, not just to tinker with negative gearing but to end it. It is within the power of this chamber to confront the scam of capital gains tax exemptions, where we—young people, workers, older Australians, mums and dads—subsidise a tax mechanism of which over 70 per cent of the profits go to the 10 per cent most wealthy households in the country. We could end that right now. We could inject billions of dollars into the affordable housing sector and into the community housing sector. We could establish, right now, a national rental standard so that nobody is forced into the situation where, if they are lucky enough to be able to rent a premises, that premises has a roof that leaks, no air conditioning or no floor. We could establish national tenancy rights standards so that tenants are always on an equal footing with landlords, and we could ensure that rental amounts are affordable for those who are faced with the need to pay them. The reality is that only 2.9 per cent of rental properties on the market right now are affordable and only 0.2 per cent of that number are affordable if you are on the Newstart payment. We could change this right now. The Greens would support any motion in this place to do so, and we back this legislation because at least it admits that the policies of this government are part of the problem—that homelessness is not inevitable and that it is not a reflection of a social or personal failing; it is a reflection of a policy failing, policies which have been passed through this chamber within my lifetime. We could do these things, but we do not. Instead, we sit here and we fiddle. We fiddle while people die on our streets.

I support this legislation. It spasms in the right direction, but it goes nowhere near as far as is needed. I would ask every senator in this chamber who does not sit with me on the Greens benches to reflect upon why they believe that serving the vested interests of those groups who lobby for the continuation of these policies, which do nothing but exacerbate this problem, is more important than serving the people who elected them to this chamber. Thank you.

Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise, too, to speak on the bills that we have before us and to say that Labor will not be opposing the passage of these bills through this chamber. However, we should be under no illusion about the government's measures in these bill, despite the rhetoric that we've heard from those opposite. They will do nothing to make housing more affordable. Sadly, that action has not been forthcoming from the Turnbull government. We have two bills that do nothing to address the housing crisis, and we need a comprehensive response to the crisis.

The first of the bills before us, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Housing Tax Integrity) Bill 2017, seeks to ensure that travel expenditure incurred in gaining or producing assessable income from residential premises is not deductible and not recognised in the cost base of the property for CGT purposes. This is an integrity measure that is meant to address concerns that some taxpayers have been claiming travel deductions without correctly apportioning costs or have claimed travel costs that were for private purposes. The second bill, the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Fees Imposition Amendment (Vacancy Fees) Bill 2017, imposes the vacancy fee and establishes the amount payable. Broadly, the fee, which will be payable when a dwelling is left vacant, is the fee that was payable at the time of the foreign investment application.

I must be clear: Labor is all for ensuring that tax concessions are targeted, but we are the party which has been leading the debate on this. As previous speakers have noted on the Labor side—and on the Greens side—this is not a housing affordability measure. As we know, housing is a powerful determinant of social and economic participation. Australia is in a housing crisis—a crisis of supply and a crisis of affordability. This housing crisis has far-reaching consequences: people experiencing homelessness, people in rental stress, first home buyers and people relocating or downsizing. Recently, at the ACT Housing and Homelessness Summit, Labor's shadow minister for housing, Senator Doug Cameron, outlined the challenge for us:

The government's Affordable Housing Working Group has estimated that an additional 6,000 social housing dwellings will be required each year just to keep pace with future population growth, without addressing the backlog of need.

A more comprehensive estimate prepared by Dr Judith Yates for the Council for Economic Development of Australia is that Australia needs 20,000 extra affordable housing dwellings each year for at least a decade to address the backlog of need among those on low to moderate incomes.

Using the most recent estimates for the number of households in rental stress, of which there are 527,500, even if half of all the 220,000 new dwellings built each year were made affordable and available to low-moderate income households, it would take over 5 years of new supply to address rental stress amongst Australia’s poorest households.

…   …   …

In April this year, Labor announced a package of measures that included $88 million over two years to improve transitional housing options for women and children escaping family and domestic violence, young people exiting out-of-home care and older women under financial stress who are at risk of homelessness.

A Labor government will develop and implement a national plan to reduce homelessness through the Council of Australian Governments. There is a massive gap in housing policy, and we need national leadership to address it. Labor's response to the housing and homelessness challenge requires a concerted, cooperative effort across all levels of government and society. Labor's current policies to address housing affordability include reform of negative gearing and capital gains tax and support for the creation of a bond aggregator to facilitate investment in social and affordable housing. They are important steps, but we are not stopping there. Labor is providing the national leadership that is necessary to drive a concerted national plan to address the housing crisis.

Australia is in the midst of a housing affordability and homelessness crisis. House prices in many major cities have skyrocketed. Home ownership rates have plummeted, and many vulnerable Australians have limited or no access to housing. The housing crisis is only getting worse. Since the government came to office in September 2013, capital city house prices have soared by 30 per cent, with increases of nearly 50 per cent in Sydney and over 30 per cent in Melbourne. Home ownership is at a 60-year low, and home ownership rates for 25- to 35-year-olds have collapsed from around 60 per cent to less than 40 per cent in the past 30 years.

Skyrocketing house prices have long been an issue in cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, but they are now becoming a major issue in my home state of Tasmania, with house prices in Hobart now the second highest in the nation in terms of growth, according to a recent report commissioned by the insurer QBE. The report that was put out and reported on by ABC News on 25 October 2017 notes that the median house price in Hobart is forecast to rise by 11 per cent to $470,000 by 2020, while the median price for units is expected to rise by nine per cent, reaching $360,000. These sorts of prices mean that the Australian dream is very fast getting out of reach for so many Tasmanians. It has also resulted in a further tightening of the rental market, putting further stress on those already doing it tough.

We cannot afford to ignore the human face of this. There are currently 3,000 Tasmanians on waiting lists for public and social housing. If you're on one of the lowest income support payments like youth allowance or Newstart, the possibility of just renting is getting out of reach. Something needs to change. According to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, if current policy settings remain in place, Australia's housing affordability crisis is likely to continue for another 40 years. In Labor's view that is completely unacceptable. This is a situation that requires action. According to the recently released Rental Affordability Index, relative to wages Hobart is the second most unaffordable Australian city after Sydney in which to rent. It is more expensive to rent a house in Hobart than it is in Melbourne or Brisbane. This disproportionately impacts on young people, who are also being priced out of the home ownership market. While Hobart's annual nine per cent growth in house prices might be appealing to people lucky enough to own their own homes, it means the door to home ownership for many young people is being slammed shut. Cashed-up speculators, many from interstate, outbid young Tasmanian first home buyers for the limited housing stock.

The Liberals, this government, do not have a good story to tell us on housing affordability. Under their watch, home ownership rates have fallen lower than at any other point in the last 60 years. First home buyers now make up only around 17 per cent of all home purchases. This is well below the historic average of 20 per cent. The coalition government appear to have no clue on how to go about fixing this problem or, if I was being unkind, I would say they didn't care, and in government the Liberals have made things worse. Since coming to government, first under Mr Abbott and now Mr Turnbull, they have refused to address unfair and distorting tax breaks for investors. They closed the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which was essential for a number of complexes and projects in Tasmania that have been now completed. Without that National Rental Affordability Scheme those projects that now house hundreds of people would not have been able to go ahead.

The coalition government defunded homelessness and community housing peak bodies. They failed to appoint a housing minister, so there is no-one leading the charge within the government. They abolished the National Housing Supply Council. This list is not the complete story on the government's failures. Unlike the Liberals, Labor has a plan for making more Australians have access to the housing market. Labor's policies will see the construction of over 55,000 new homes in Australia over three years and boost employment by 25,000 new jobs per year. Labor plans to improve housing affordability, increase financial stability, reduce homelessness and boost jobs.

As my colleague Senator Gallagher noted in her contribution yesterday, Labor will reform negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. We will limit direct borrowing by self-managed superannuation funds. Labor will facilitate a COAG process to introduce uniform vacant property tax across all major cities, and Labor will re-establish the National Housing Supply Council and reinstate a leader on housing—a minister for housing. We will implement those measures, along with others, because, unlike this government, Labor believe that the current affordable housing crisis in Australia is completely unacceptable. It requires the federal government to step in and fix it. We cannot sit on the sidelines and just hope the market will sort it out, because it won't.

Every Saturday in Australia, first home buyers are outbid at auctions by wealthy investors and property speculators who are taking advantage of some of the most generous tax concessions in the world. The current arrangements provide a bigger tax concession to an investor buying their fifth home than a young couple buying their first. How is it fair that an investor buying their fifth home receives a bigger tax concession than a young couple buying their first? Demand for housing is being turbocharged by unsustainable and distortionary tax concessions for investors. More than 90 per cent of lending for investment properties is for existing housing stock.

Labor will take action where the Liberals are unwilling to. We will limit future negative gearing concessions to new housing and reduce the capital gains tax discount from 50 per cent to 25 per cent. These changes will moderate the growth of house prices and redirect generous tax concessions to where we most need investment—in new housing. Redirecting investment in new housing will increase housing supply and in the process will create jobs in the construction and building sector. The McKell Institute has estimated a 10 per cent increase in construction as a result of these changes, creating up to 18,500 new homes and, as I previously mentioned, as many as 25,000 new jobs per year.

Labor does not believe in retrospective tax changes. No current investments will be impacted by this change. The independent Parliamentary Budget Office has recosted the fiscal impact of this policy. This would improve the budget by $37.8 billion over the medium term. Labor's housing policy will create jobs, it will assist in budget repair and it will begin to fix the current housing affordability crisis. Housing prices in many major cities, as many of the senators that have contributed have indicated, have skyrocketed. Homeownership rates have plummeted, and many vulnerable Australians have limited or no access to housing—all while the government continue to sit on their hands. The current situation cannot go on. What do we have from the Turnbull government? It is a government that continues to defend existing negative gearing arrangements and capital gains tax discounts, the vast bulk of which go to those in the top 10 per cent of the income distribution. The government knows that. I'm sure Senator Smith knows that. The vast bulk of those discounts go to those in the top 10 per cent of income distribution. Change is needed and it is needed now.

As I said earlier, Labor will not oppose these bills, but make no mistake: these measures have nothing to do with housing affordability. In fact, as I said, two of these are very clearly described as integrity measures. Any housing affordability package that does not deal with negative gearing and capital gains tax discount is a sham. The government needs to deal with both negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, otherwise it will stand condemned. Labor has been leading the way on housing affordability through Senator Cameron, as the shadow minister for housing, and only Labor will properly deal with a system that advantages investors over first home buyers.

I want to once again put on record what is happening in my home town. As we know, in Tasmania, there have been reports produced about the housing property market squeezing out those who are most disadvantaged. Meg Webb of Anglicare's Social Action and Research Centre said that the rising prices—and I'm paraphrasing here—may be good for the market, but the same cannot be said for the 3,000 Tasmanians on waiting lists for public and social housing. When Senator Duniam came in here yesterday to make his contribution on this legislation, he also talked about Hobart and the fact that house prices are rising. But, as far as I can recall from his contribution, he made no mention of the fact that 3,000 Tasmanians are currently on waiting lists for public and social housing.

As I said when I started my contribution, Labor won't be opposing these bills, but these bills do not make a policy on housing affordability. (Time expired)

Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight about 100,000 people across Australia have no home to go to. But, meanwhile, across Australia there are many more than 100,000 homes that are vacant. That's clearly a scandal. It's a scandal that's one of the many housing scandals that's been dominating headlines for the past year. We know how serious it is. We know how hard it is for people to buy their first home. Young people, and particularly older women, are really finding it tough to stay in the housing market. So many people are close to being in a very serious situation. It's estimated that 2.3 million people are in housing stress. That means that they're one disaster away from being on the slippery slope to joining the more than 100,000 people who are homeless. If their kids get sick, if they lose their job or if they have an accident at work and their income stops, then their ability to pay their rent or their mortgage can suffer, and it's all part of this housing crisis that's been dominating the news. The issue relating to vacant houses really has scandalised people. We see more and more people sleeping on our streets—literally on our streets—and there are so many vacant houses.

So, we have this legislation before us. What does the government come up with? The vacancy fees bill. It sounds good—fees on vacant houses. Who can argue with that? But we need to look at it more closely, because the fees only apply to foreign investors. Now, you really have to ask, when you get to this point and you realise what the government is up to: what's the difference between an investor from China and one from Point Piper, Double Bay, North Sydney, or you name it? What's the difference with who owns this vacant property? What's going on here?

The government knows exactly what it's doing. There are a few reasons it has come up with this vacancy fees bill. It has come up with it because it needs to appear to be doing something, because the housing issue has been dominating the headlines so much for so long. But it's not just working-class families; many middle-class families are really worried about what the future holds for their children and for their loved ones, so the government had to come up with a position that gives the appearance they are doing something. And they need to deliver for their constituency: the big end of town, the property developers, the investment speculators, the real estate agencies.

But there's also a racist aspect to this, because this is dog whistling. You can get out there and do your grabs and say: 'We're doing something. We're pursuing the foreign owners.' Why do that? There's absolutely no difference at all, but the Liberal-National Party government under Prime Minister Turnbull is doing the classic dog whistling: getting out there at every turn and talking about foreign ownership of houses. People do raise it with me. They're certainly hearing that, and they're picking up on the fear. There's no need to be fearful. We need action—we certainly need action on vacant houses—but what the government is doing here is totally minimalist.

I said another reason that they're doing this is to deliver for their constituency. The constituency is very generous to the Liberal and National parties and also at times to the Labor Party. Over the past 10 years, property developers, property speculators and the real estate industry have donated more than $21 million to the Labor, Liberal and National parties. I'm not saying it's Labor's constant constituency, but there have been some years when Labor have picked up more donations from the developers than they have from unions. That's a pretty worrying state of affairs, because this is a powerful industry.

If you look at what goes on in our respective states, you'll see planning laws being weakened for the benefit of those companies, because, when the planning laws are weakened, they can make more profits. That's what's going on here. Again, what's the job of the Liberals and Nationals when they get into government? Deliver for their constituency. At the moment that means not going hard on the housing crisis that is making life so difficult for so many people, where they don't have certainty about their future and where many people are in insecure housing.

The government might pay lip service to addressing the housing crisis, but for their constituency a housing crisis works for them. What I mean by that is that they make more profits, which is what their donors, the property sector, need to do. They do it very handsomely—the profits they pull in. When you look at Meriton, Mirvac and many of those other big companies, they're making millions and millions of dollars profit every year. They're pulling in big money. That, again, is why the bill before us is so absolutely minimal.

There's the destructive side of the bill, but, even if you look at the foreign ownership side, they're not handling the issue of vacant properties in the way it needs to be. It's not a tough one. What we need to be doing when it comes to housing is recognising that we need universal housing. Housing is a human right. It's something that's recognised along with other human rights, but we barely hear about it in Australia. We have arrived at a shocking situation in this first part of the 21st century. As I said, about 100,000 people will be on the streets tonight. If 100,000 children couldn't get a place in our public schools, there'd be an outcry. It would be on the front page of the paper. If 100,000 sick people—people who had had accidents or had some worry with their health—arrived at hospitals and they couldn't be admitted, that would be scandalous. It's just not possible that it would happen. It's widely recognised, even by people who have their kids in private schools and who have private health insurance, that we need a strong public sector. When it comes to public housing, what's happened around the country, helped by successive federal governments, is that public housing has been smashed, totally discredited. The people who live there are presented as losers, people who are really just not functioning in life. The whole dignity of housing, which should be absolutely the foundation of our approach, has just been decimated in this country.

It was excellent to hear the Greens' new senator Senator Andrew Bartlett speaking about the fantastic plans that the Queensland Greens are taking to this election. This is precisely the approach that we need, where we have governments committed to public and social housing in such a way that it becomes much more mainstream. I'm not talking about ending the private housing market—there is still a role for that—but we need to resurrect public housing, restore respect for it and restore its dignity so it can get back to the form that it has been in the past. The plan in Queensland, for the Queensland housing trust, is very exciting. They'll start building a million affordable homes. One of the fantastic spin-offs is that, as well as the homes, this will also provide jobs—16,000 jobs a year, over 10 years, to deliver those million affordable homes. These will be homes for life, providing people with certainty because they will be able to afford their home. They will be able to gain support from this trust according to their needs and make repayments according to what they can afford.

This might sound pie-in-the-sky in Australia at the moment, when you consider what the housing market has become. Housing effectively has become another form of money, because it is a way for those who have got two, three, four or five investment properties to be able to use the tax breaks that this government won't do anything about. People who have already got money can make more money out of the way housing works in this country. Yes, we've got to get rid of those tax breaks, but we also need to rebuild the public and the social housing system in this country. Much of Europe already has this. It is not dominated by housing which is stuck in the marketplace, with people really battling and very uncertain about what their future holds because of the price of housing and the price of rents. This really is the healthy way to go; it's the responsible way to go.

If this government, the Liberal-National government, under Prime Minister Turnbull, were serious about housing, what we would be debating tonight would be the winding-down of negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, because that's a rort for those who already have money, because of the way it works. It is literally robbing billions of dollars from the public purse—money that could go into something similar to the Queensland housing trust that the Queensland Greens are taking to this election. We need something at the federal level like that. We need something like that in all states. This is the responsible way for any government to be taking Australia. Housing is going to become more of a crisis if we do not deal with it. Housing is a human right. Universal housing should be the foundation policy of all parties that are really serious about addressing people's needs.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This legislation purports to address the housing challenge. As many other participants in the debate have pointed out, it is not going to do a great deal about that. We support the legislation. We support measures to improve tax transparency, but in no way is this legislation an adequate response to the challenges which are facing Australians in relation to housing, and in no way has the government provided more generally an adequate policy response to the challenges of housing.

In fact, in the not very long time that I've been here, 2½ years, all I have witnessed is a government completely unable to come to grips with this challenge—organisationally in terms of their ministerial and shadow cabinet arrangements but also bureaucratically. Every time we seek information about how the government is responding to the housing crisis, we get given about three different departments—the names of three different groups of people who may or may not be responsible or leading a particular initiative. We get told that one group of people in Treasury is responsible for leading an initiative and then we find out subsequently that actually Prime Minister and Cabinet have had to step in and they are now leading some sort of working group that's convening, and shortly to be replaced by, an IDC. There is total confusion within the Commonwealth about what the goals are for housing policy, who is responsible for leading it within the bureaucracy and what the key actions are to reach those goals.

The fact that the bill before the chamber today purports to be a bill to address housing but, in fact, really addresses important but, in the context of housing policy, relatively insignificant tax measures says a great deal about how the government's approaching this. It's a great shame, because we do actually have quite a significant problem. There is a very big problem with a lack of affordable rental properties. Every year, Anglicare do this terrific survey where they look at what proportion of the rental properties on the market would be available to certain kinds of income groups. When they looked at it last year, they found that singles on the age pension could afford just 2.1 per cent of the 75,000 properties that they surveyed. Think about that: if you are on the age pension and trying to exist in the private rental market, just 2.1 per cent of the properties available would be suitable for you.

There is a kind of a myth—and I hear the National Party say this often—'All you have to do is move to Orange' or 'All you have to do is move to the country.' It's a problem in regional areas as well. People on Newstart would only be able to afford 15 per cent of the 18,000 regional properties that were surveyed in this process. Even double-income families struggle. A household with two kids and two parents on a minimum wage would be able to afford just 26 per cent of the surveyed properties. If that same family were trying to get by on Newstart, they'd have access to only 1.9 per cent of the surveyed properties. It's a big problem and it requires a serious solution. We know that one solution that works is public housing.

When we measure housing stress, a common measure of housing stress is when your housing costs are greater than 30 per cent of your disposable income and the household income is in the bottom 40 per cent of all households. Well, only half a per cent of people in public housing are in that category. One of the key benefits of public housing is that it does represent a serious and effective response to housing stress for very low-income people. Unfortunately, more than 40 per cent of all Australians who are receiving Commonwealth rent assistance are in housing stress. They spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Horrifyingly, 13 per cent of them spend more than 50 per cent of their income on rent. These are issues that should shock us and it should be a time when we're thinking about how to provide more public housing and how to provide more social housing.

There's been a very significant decrease in the number of public rental housing households. Between 2007 and 2014, the number of public rental households decreased from 331,000 to 317,000, a fall of four per cent. Quite a bit of that reflects a transfer of stock from public housing to community housing, because in the same period the number of mainstream community-housing households has almost doubled. It's risen very substantially. But this shifting, this pea-and-thimble trick, doesn't really go to the core of the problem. There is simply not enough affordable housing available for people who need it.

We talk a lot about the pressures in capital cities. In fact, you sometimes get the impression that the main thing that drives our capital city newspapers is the property section. It's hard to go by any day of the week where there isn't a story about house prices in Sydney or Melbourne. But, actually, it is a really big problem in regional areas. I think senators will know that I grew up on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, and as a senator I have occasion to visit the communities on the North Coast of New South Wales. I spent a little bit of time earlier in the year with the Coffs Harbour Neighbourhood Centre. They tell me that Coffs Harbour actually doesn't have any crisis accommodation at all. The neighbourhood centre is in a lovely building. It's an old school. It's got one of those old school verandahs that people might remember from when they went to school—you used to hang your bag on the peg on the verandah. The good people at the Coffs Harbour Neighbourhood Centre have repurposed that area of their building. It's now a shelter for sometimes 20, sometimes 30, people living in Coffs Harbour who really don't have anywhere to go each evening. There is no crisis accommodation. The neighbourhood centre is not in a position to provide crisis accommodation for these people, but they are able to provide them with a place out of the rain—albeit not inside, but a place on a verandah out of the rain—where they can get a little bit of food in the morning and actually get a little bit of care. They assist these desperate people in their desperate circumstances.

It's troubling that there isn't a more structured response to these problems in our regions. Places like Coffs Harbour might not be growing as fast as the rest of the state, but it's still projected to grow very significantly between now and 2050. I struggle to get any real sense that either the state government in New South Wales or the Commonwealth government is thinking seriously about how these coastal areas cope with some very specific challenges that they face in terms of housing.

Shelter NSW, the peak group that represents housing providers and advocates on housing issues, did some great work, which they released in March this year, which took a look at regional perspectives on housing and homelessness. It's a very useful document, and I encourage senators to go and have a look at it. They go region by region and create a very specific breakdown of the kinds of issues in each of those places that are confronting those communities. In Coffs Harbour, they're finding that house prices and rents on the coast are pushing people westward for affordable rentals. Locally, certain areas have remained affordable, but the housing is run down and the market is becoming very geographically stratified. In a small town everyone knows everyone else, and there are sometimes families—a lot of people with the same name—and it only takes one person with your surname in your family to do the wrong thing for everybody in that family to be shut out of the rental market, because real estate agents are willing to apply essentially discriminatory practices in accepting or rejecting tenants.

The development of university campuses increases competition for housing. Students tend to displace locals, especially in low-end housing. In coastal towns like Coffs Harbour and my own community on the Tweed, there is huge seasonal variation in rental prices. Rents go up dramatically over Christmas and people can find themselves homeless at that point, particularly if you've got a lease that ends in the summer; it's likely that that won't be renewed because the owner is in a position to chase much higher rents from temporary holiday rentals.

There are some real challenges in regional Australia with housing. There are real challenges across the country, but the problem with the bill before us and with all of the policy settings presented by the coalition is that they're not addressing this in any systematic, focused or energetic way. There is a disregard for the issue and an apparent unwillingness to take it seriously. Labor has put a range of policies on the table, particularly around tax, negative gearing and capital gains reform. Unfortunately, these—

Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McAllister, it is now 7.20. You will be in continuation.

Debate interrupted.