MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (17:32): While first home buyers spend their Saturday getting outbid by property investors, and renters line the block for a chance to spend three-quarters of their weekly income to keep a roof over their heads, this Labor government continues to hand out $181 billion in tax breaks to already wealthy property investors.

Housing is a human right, and yet more and more people cannot afford to have their own home, and homelessness just keeps on rising. People are getting angry. The conservatives want people to blame migrants for the housing crisis, which is both racist and unfounded, rather than take on the interests of the billionaires and big corporates that benefit from the status quo.

It's inequality and not immigration that people should be angry about. The housing crisis is caused by a system designed to prioritise corporate profit margins over everyday people, and a system that makes it easier for someone to buy their fifth, their 10th or their 50th house than for someone to buy their first. Even if you can cobble together the five per cent deposit that you need under Labor's new scheme—which is only going to and already has started to push prices up—the repayments on that massive amount of debt will be crippling.

First home buyers with a 95 per cent mortgage debt will be slammed with more than $1,000 in weekly mortgage repayments. Now, that's more than three-quarters of a nurse's income on the average price of a house in Sydney. Banks will love it, though.

It's great for their profits. And that's what this is: Labor's five per cent house deposit scheme is a policy for bank profits, not for first home buyers. It will drive up house prices, and it will encourage people to take out home loans that they cannot afford.

The big banks are making billions of dollars in profits while people are struggling to afford a roof over their head. It is obscene, and it is by design, and this government just keeps on backing it in. Without tackling the root cause of the housing crisis, Labor's scheme will simply inflate prices further, locking even more people out of homeownership—all of this while this Labor government happily hands out $181 billion in negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts to people with more homes than they need.

We could end those unfair tax handouts and start levelling the playing field. That's a no-brainer. We could cap and freeze rents.

We could actually build more public and affordable homes with a publicly owned property developer to build them so that people, and not profit, are the driver of the decisions. I cannot stress enough that change is possible. The housing crisis is no accident.

It is within government's control to address it, and the Greens will keep fighting to do just that. (Time expired)