DOCUMENTS

Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (10:12): I also rise to take note of Minister Ayres's response on behalf of the Minister for Housing. The measure that Minister Ayres has responded to is seeking documents which lay out the methodology behind a very significant program in a massive housing crisis that is affecting millions of Australians across our country—in our country towns, in our regional areas, in every city.

To this OPD, No. 27, the minister points to the fact that he has given us the answer, an answer which has been proven to be entirely wrong out of the model. A change of 0.6 per cent, half a per cent, over six years in the price of housing—we need to know how that model was arrived at, to make sense of a figure which has so clearly misjudged the actual circumstance here.

But it's not just about the details of the model here; it is about a principle of respecting the Senate and giving the Senate the information it needs to make sense of this crisis and to make sense of the programs that this government is offering. The five per cent deposit scheme is uncapped. It is being used by people, clearly—we now have evidence—to purchase investment properties.

There are real problems with this scheme, and this Senate should be treated with—the minister himself used the words—respect and understanding. Well, we want to understand, and we do respect the data. We do want to see the modelling, and we want to see its detail to make sense of a policy in a crisis that deserves the highest level of action by this Labor government.

Minister Ayres ended his comments by saying that this is all arising from 'a campaign run by spivs in our capital cities'. I find that offensive. I spent last week in Perth.

I spent last week in Perth and I can tell you there are hundreds of Western Australians who are homeless. They are in their cars. They are under bridges.

They are sleeping rough across the city and in our regional towns in Western Australia. They came to us, to our Senate select committee, to give evidence about what this does to them as individuals, as families—how it affects communities. We took evidence from someone who lost their home at 11 years old, who was homeless at 11 years old.

Another person had been homeless from her early 20s. She had been homeless for 11 years. The crisis that is underway for young people, for older women, for people across the country that is exemplified by what we're seeing in Perth is an emergency.

And this Senate deserves respect, to use the minister's own word. It deserves the information and it deserves full disclosure about the policies and their background. In Perth, we heard about 1,300 families evicted from public housing without grounds in the past eight years.

That is incredible. It is the disarray, the disaster that is represented by our public housing across our country. Come to South Australia.

It is a disaster. We have not been replacing public housing. We've been knocking it down and we've been casting people out of rentals, with no public housing opportunity available to them, into their cars and into their tents across our parklands.

So many people in Western Australia asked me last week, 'How have we arrived at this circumstance in our wealthy country?' And I walked around the streets of Perth, those tall buildings sparkling in the sun, a city that exudes wealth. It has enormous opportunity and resources and it is part of a country, one of the wealthiest in the OECD area, where we have hundreds—indeed, thousands—of people homeless because of the failure of this policy.

So I want the minister to come here and be honest and respectful to the chamber. Give us the data. Give us the breakdown of the modelling not just on the five per cent scheme but on other schemes as sought by this Senate.

We've seen youth homelessness increase by rapid figures in the past decade—32 per cent in Perth in the past decade—and rent is up by 50 per cent just since 2020. So we need action and we need data and we need modelling about what's going on for the third of Australians, many of them young people, who are now renting for decades. It's not a short, temporary, transitional period of renting as you accumulate your first home deposit; it takes twice as long in this year to accumulate your deposit as it did 10 years ago.

So we have a lot of work to do here and we need a respectful response from the minister on the modelling, on the actual details of the modelling and on the background to any policy which the government brings forward to help us deal with a massive crisis that Labor's policies at present are not touching the sides of.