Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are living through a rental crisis. Today, yet again, we have confirmation that Hobart, in my home state of Tasmania, is the most unaffordable city in the country for renters. This is not just a policy failure; this is actually a policy design. It's a policy design endorsed by both of the major parties in this place, the political duopoly.

Both of the major parties in this place regard landlords as a protected species, and the political duopoly in this place will stop at nothing to make sure that landlords are able to make as much money from rents as possible. They, the Coles and Woolworths of politics, have decided that the only constituency they want to win is the people who own homes, especially those who own multiple homes. The Liberals don't care about tenants and the Labor Party arrogantly assume that tenants will just vote for them anyway. Together, they hand over billions of dollars a year in subsidies to landlords in the form of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, and they refuse to build the public housing necessary to address the crisis. It is absolutely perverse.

Tenants are bled dry with unaffordable rents, and then, when they pay tax, the major parties get together to hand that tax over to the landlords. Then the RBA jacks up interest rates, and the increase in the cost of borrowing is passed on by the landlords to the tenants in the form of even higher rents. It's a rigged system. We're on our way to neo-feudalism in Australia. The tenants always lose. That's why we need a national freeze on rents in this country and we need it now.

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

I again want to highlight housing affordability across Australia. Today, National Shelter and SGS Economics & Planning released the 11th national Rental Affordability Index. As we all know, it's very sobering reading. We are in a housing crisis across the country. It's very easy to talk about it in terms of statistics, but we need to remember that there are people in our communities who are struggling to put food on the table due to the cost of housing.

Canberra is at the forefront of this housing crisis. We currently have a shortfall of over 3,100 social houses. Under the very welcome HAF, we stand to get 540 or so houses. Clearly, there's a lot of work to be done on this. I would really like to thank National Shelter, ACT Shelter and others for the work they are doing on continuing to highlight the depth and breadth of this issue.

I implore senators to work together to ensure that we can have a conversation in Australia about what housing is for. My sense in talking to people across the ACT is that people want housing to be viewed more as a human right, as something that people in our communities can afford, rather than as an investment vehicle that seems to forever be putting it more and more out of reach for younger generations and the most vulnerable in our communities.