GOVERNOR-GENERAL'S SPEECH
Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (12:31): In the Governor-General's address to parliament, Her Excellency said: The government recognises the dream of homeownership feels out of reach for many—particularly young people and aspiring first home buyers. But the government isn't doing what needs to be done to make sure that everyone has a home. On any given night in Queensland, right now, 22,000 Queenslanders are experiencing homelessness.
Of that number, roughly 20 per cent are young people aged 12 to 24. That's 4,454 young people experiencing homelessness in Queensland on any given night. The Greens have been advocating since we came into this place for a massive build of public housing.
The only way we're going to address the housing crisis is to actually build homes for people to live in. After the Second World War, the Australian government was building roughly 30 per cent of the housing stock in this country, and people were proud to live in a home built by government. Since that time, successive governments have done what governments do: they let those assets run down; they sell them off; they turn them into something that no-one wants to live in, so that there's no demand, and then they vacate the field.
The Greens think that the federal government needs to get back in the business of working towards building more public homes, because everybody needs to have a home. The incoming prime minister from the UK Labour Party, Andy Burnham, said in a speech earlier this week that he thinks that the way for the UK to come back to prosperity is to have a massive build of public housing—to take a housing-first approach.
Finland has had a housing-first model for more than 15 years, and they are one of the only European countries that registers decreasing homelessness numbers. It's not rocket science. If you want to house people, you need to build houses, and the government should be playing a leading role in building high-quality, accessible public homes for everyone, to tackle this housing crisis.
We need genuine investment in social and affordable housing. And we need to have continuing support for renters, because rents are still going up right across the country. We need a renters' protection authority to step in and make sure that renters have rights that are protected.
We still have states that have no-grounds evictions. The federal government needs to be taking a leading role to make sure that they are abolished. We need to stop unlimited rent increases by limiting increases to two per cent every two years.
The Labor government says it can't do that because it's a state issue. Well, there are plenty of other things where the federal government has stepped in. They did it for gas.
If you can step in for gas to make sure that people have supply, then you can step in and give incentives to the states to cap rents. They also need to regulate the banks to deliver fairer, lower mortgages. The five per cent home deposit scheme is simply funnelling more money to the banks, as more and more younger people have had to take on massive mortgages, with 95 per cent borrowings, where the extra interest—$200,000 on average—goes back to the big banks.
We're in a cost-of-living crisis. People are struggling to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their head. This Labor government came to power, came to parliament, with a massive majority, and the people of Australia looked to the government to make real progressive reform, to tackle the issues that are impacting them.
Yet this government continues to tinker around the edges. It should not be the case that one in six kids is living in poverty. Many of them are those same young people in Queensland who are homeless.
It should not be the case that people can't afford for their kids to go to school. This government says it cares about young people and education. They like to tell everyone that they fully funded our public schools, but they haven't.
All of the bilateral agreements are backloaded. Money doesn't finally flow fully until 2034, and, even then, we will have loopholes that will still remain that will let states spend that money not on kids in classrooms but on things like teacher registration bodies. It's just another example where the Labor government want the community to think that they've fixed the thing when they've only gone halfway or partway there.
Right around the country, teachers are overworked, underpaid and lacking in resources, and yet we've seen in the Comms Declare report that fossil fuel companies, gas companies and coal companies are infiltrating our schools, taking advantage of the fact that schools don't have the resources that they need to do their jobs well. There's so much opportunity wasted.
Government likes to talk about the need for kids' school results to improve. How does a kid who either is homeless, is hungry or has a family that's experiencing family and domestic violence—a family which can't get help because the frontline services aren't properly funded—meant to do well at school? It's public-school teachers who carry the burden of helping those kids because we know that public-school teachers teach 85 per cent of kids who have some kind of complex need.
Yet we still have a situation where virtually every private school in this country is overfunded, and 98 per cent of public schools are still not at 100 per cent of their full funding—yet the government wants you to believe that the job is done. It's frontline workers, it's parents, it's carers—particularly women—who are carrying the load in this country for the issues this government won't fix.
It's women who are carrying the burden when they can't find care for their older parent. It's women who are carrying the burden as their NDIS supports are being cut off. Yet when the government needs to find money for submarines and war, it's no questions asked, no accountability.
When parties that aren't part of Labor or the coalition try to get transparency around that, we just get a brick wall. We've got big data companies like Palantir getting massive contracts, being invited in. We've got big corporations wanting to build their data centres right near people's homes, being invited in.
Yet everyday people want their voices to be heard, and they feel like no-one is listening. The Greens are listening. We understand what it means for you when you can't afford the rent.
The Greens understand what it means for you when your kids' public school doesn't have the resources it needs. The Greens understand what it means for you when your NDIS supports are being cut. The Greens understand what it means for you when your older parent gets assessed by a computer and no-one can override the decision when it's wrong.
So much good can be done if the government has the political will and the courage to stand up to powerful and vested interests. It is big corporations that get a say in this place more often than the people we are all elected to serve. This morning we saw the Senate doing its job, holding the government to account, putting up legislation that will right a wrong—and it passed in this place.
We will now see a bill that makes sure every single older person who needs an assessment for care can have a human make the final decision—not just people who are deemed the exception, but everyone. That bill passed in this place. But you watch it sit languishing in the lower house, where the government has a massive majority.
They could fix that problem today. It's always people doing it toughest. It's always the services that care for people where the government wants to make cuts—put an algorithm into aged care to reduce costs, kick people off the NDIS to reduce costs, make public schools wait until 2034 to reduce costs, make frontline DV services continue to wait to be fully funded for the level of need that they say they have for people wanting help.
Yet when big corporations don't want to ban gambling ads because they'll lose money, and coal and gas companies say, 'Don't you dare stop giving us subsidies for our fuel, because our profits won't be so big', and when big corporations come into this place and lobby governments, they get their way. No wonder people are frustrated. No wonder people want their politicians to do better.
When asked, most people think that the cause of, or the No. 1 reason for, the cost-of-living crisis they are experiencing is politicians—and who could blame them? This government has the power to make price gouging across our economy illegal, but it voted it down when the Greens put it up. This government has the power to end fossil fuel subsidies, end billions of dollars in subsidies to big corporations, but it won't do it.
This government has the power to fully fund our public schools, not by 2034 and with loopholes but this year, but it won't. The Greens are the ones in this place who are continually putting things on the agenda and waiting for the government and the opposition to catch up. It is a real honour to represent the people of Queensland in this place.
As your Greens senator for Queensland, I am committed to continuing to advocate for decent, dignified aged care for older people at the time that they need it, not a system that continues to ration care. I am committed to continuing to advocate for our students and our teachers and our parents and our public schools, because they should have a system that they are proud of and that is fully funded—not in a decade but now.
I am committed to continuing to advocate for people on social services, people who are on income support, who continue to be subjected to a cruel and inhumane targeted compliance framework that the government isn't even sure is lawful. And I am committed to continuing to advocate for the people across northern Australia, who, despite governments talking the talk, continue to experience a lack of the services that they deserve.