STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (12:33): In the last week we've been inundated with headlines and stories of property managers and landlords declaring that any changes to the tens of billions of dollars they receive in tax concessions will result in rent hikes. In fact, we've seen reporting showing that rents have increased, including in my home state of Queensland.
This is a grave threat not just to the renters who are now saddled with even more burden in a cost-of-living crisis but to our democracy itself. We have a privatised housing system that has vested so much power in the hands of property developers and landlords. They are essentially holding the government hostage under the threat of rent increases.
Either we continue to give them tens of billions in tax concessions and safeguard their enormous profits, or they use their power to make renters hurt for it. This is the reaction of the landlords and developers to even inadequate reforms to negative gearing. What does it say about our housing system that we are deep into catastrophic housing unaffordability with an entire generation set to be locked out of homeownership and that now we know that, if anything is done about it by our government, they will punish renters?
It is too often said that the rental market has raised prices—'the market is reacting to this or that'. No, people raised prices. People made the decision that their profits are more important than the renters and workers that need a roof over their heads.
This is a particularly blatant exercise of their power. We need a rent freeze and we need to build massive amounts of public housing. We need to take power back for renters, for workers and for ordinary people.
The Greens are fighting to guarantee permanent affordability, not one that waxes and wanes and endlessly trends towards ripping renters off. $3.8 billion has been ripped from Queenslanders. When Queenslanders are homeless, our state government is spending $3.8 billion not on housing and not on cost-of-living relief but on a stadium.
Sixty-four hectares of inner city parkland and sacred First Nations land will be lost forever. Earlier this week, Yagara elders took the fight to protect Barrambin to Canberra. Barrambin, also known as Victoria Park, is a public heritage listed greenspace in Brisbane that is being destroyed as we speak.
The clearing of over 200 trees across a matter of days is an environmental emergency. Ten of those trees were over 200 years old, carrying a significant historical and cultural significance, marking a time pre-colonisation. This destruction is occurring on unceded First Nations land.
It is a sacred site. In May, to enforce the LNP state government's agenda, Queensland Police forcibly and violently disrupted an Aboriginal ceremony to dismantle the Barrambin djar and Goori Camp Embassy, in violation of Queensland's Human Rights Act. But Yagara traditional custodians, the Save Victoria Park movement and the Queensland Greens will not give up the fight.
On 5 August, the Yagara Magandjin Aboriginal Corporation lodged an application with the federal government for permanent legal protection for Barrambin. All of us in this place have a responsibility to preserve our environment and to honour First Nations sovereignty. I call on federal Labor to stop the desecration of this sacred site.
In the Redlands, on Brisbane's bayside, a wealthy private school where members of Queensland's LNP government send their kids is wiping out threatened koala habitat to build sports fields and new boarding facilities. There are 650 trees on this site which sits within a designated koala habitat and koala priority area. If this deforestation continues, it will wreck an important wildlife corridor and destroy habitat relied on by endangered koalas.
I've visited this site and I've met with the community. I've seen Leaf and her joey high up in a eucalyptus tree, just metres from men with chainsaws and excavation equipment. I watched as the local police fined passers-by for offering support of beeps of their horns to the protesters.
Environment minister Murray Watt gave the go-ahead for this destruction, despite more than 500 community submissions offering detailed and legitimate objections. What is the point of environment laws if they don't protect the environment, and what is the point of an environment minister if he can't even do the primary job he's meant to do? Senator Waters and I wrote to Senator Watt to ask him why he decided to give the go-ahead to Ormiston.
What was his response? The college had concluded that significant impacts were unlikely to occur. Tell that to the koalas.
Centuries of barely regulated clearing and development have left Queensland's koala population on death's door. In the Redlands, the koala population has collapsed by about 80 per cent since the early 2000s, with fewer than 500 koalas remaining on the mainland. There is no community licence for this development and absolutely no support, and opposition is growing.
More than 20,000 people have signed a petition calling on the school to stop clearing the site, and there are more and more demonstrations planned. The Greens support the community and their fight, and we won't give up with you. On Friday, Queensland's Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee delivered its report into the state government's Youth Justice (Circuit Breaker) Amendment Bill 2026, which serves up the reheated leftovers of Queensland LNP's failed youth boot-camp program.
This bill proposes to send children as young as 10 and who have not yet been convicted of a crime to a remote location away from family to do forced activities and programs. This can include free labour, which is just a nicer term for slave labour. When people are forced into free-work arrangements against their will, it acts as a perverse incentive to criminalise more children, who, again, have not had their case heard in court and who have not yet been convicted.
Children will be confined to a remote, highly surveilled and controlled coercive setting, but these settings aren't proposed to be subject to inspections or reporting. More than that, there's an exemption to reporting obligations for actual or suspected harm to a child participating in circuit-breaker programs if the report might tend to incriminate the institution.
Last I checked, physical and sexual abuse was a crime. How is there any situation where a report of harm will not incriminate the institution? Why on earth would this exemption exist in the proposed legislation unless it was deliberately aiding and abetting the abuse of our children?
The Victims' Commissioner's submission on the bill specifically refers to the cycle of crime in which many young offenders are caught as victims themselves. Ironically, rather than breaking that cycle, this bill will perpetuate it. Youth offending will go up.
When the Queensland state government is giving the green light for the abuse of children, tearing them away from everything that has been proven to stop youth offending—family, community, schooling and safe housing—those children are going to come out of these facilities angry, traumatised and disconnected from their communities. Victims of crime deserve safety, but this is not the answer.