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

Last night, the Parliamentary Friends of Housing, which I co-chair with the members for Macnamara and Moncrieff, Josh Burns and Angie Bell, hosted a screening of Under Cover, a chilling documentary exposing the crisis of homelessness facing older women in Australia. It's available on iview, and I encourage all of my colleagues to watch it. We heard from Margaret, who is in the documentary and is currently living in her van. She had questions for politicians but also was sharing her story. She said that, when she posted on Facebook that she was coming to Canberra for this, she received over 300 responses from other women in similar situations who wanted to share their experiences and their solutions.

Last year National Shelter brought a delegation of women with lived experience of this crisis to parliament. Their stories were heartbreaking—an 84-year-old being kicked out of her family home by her now ex-husband and forced into homelessness. That is just one story of thousands of women who have lost access to secure housing through relationship breakdown. According to census data, older women—those aged 55 and over—were the fastest-growing cohort of homeless Australians between 2011 and 2016, increasing by a staggering 31 per cent. In the most recent census, they were overtaken by young people. Around 28,200 young people aged 12 to 24 years were estimated to have been experiencing homelessness on census night in 2021, making up nearly a quarter of the total homeless population—and there are many who believe that this is an underestimation. Here in the ACT there is no dedicated youth homeless shelter. We have to do better.

We know about these problems. We know that we need more ambition from everyone in this place to actually solve them—not to have promises of things in the future but to get down and find the solutions now. I believe we need to start with the conversation around what housing is for in Australia. Is this a human right? We've signed up to the UN convention, but it's not reflected anywhere here in Australia. Is this a human right? Is this something that everyone in our communities should be able to afford, so everyone can be safe, or is this an investment vehicle? Is this something where you can expect it to be hard to get onto the property ladder, but, once you're on, you can expect values to go up and you can expect it potentially to be easier to buy your second home than your first?

Applications for round 1 of the Housing Australia Future Fund close on Friday, and, from what I hear, demand from community housing providers to access the funding is strong. The capacity is there, and we know that the need is there too. Thirty thousand homes over five years is a start, but it's not going to touch the sides. I urge the government to double the HAFF in the upcoming budget. You've got people doing it tough, living in homelessness. You've got a surplus. Spend that on housing. Double the size of the HAFF in the budget.

We also need to put property tax concession reform on the table. We've got to be talking about the capital gains tax discount on investment properties and negative gearing. One thing that has dropped off—we haven't heard the government talk about it for a while—is that the NRAS, the National Rental Affordability Scheme, is being phased out at the moment. At the very time that we're hearing them talk about the need for more social and affordable homes, we're phasing out a scheme. Take the ACT, for example. We'll potentially get 1,200 homes under the HAFF. We're losing more through the phasing-out of NRAS. It makes no sense. This is something the government could have funded. Their excuse is, 'The coalition decided to end funding for this.' They made the decision not to fund it. I urge them to look at the NRAS properties that are still there and whether they can be bought or the NRAS can be continued. We've heard talk about rental reform. This was promised through National Cabinet. We've heard nothing else. This is urgent.