Housing Legislation Amendment (National Definition of Affordable Housing) Bill 2026
Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (10:34): It is. I'd like to congratulate the member for Bradfield for bringing this bill, the Housing Legislation Amendment (National Definition of Affordable Housing) Bill 2026, to the House, because affordable housing is a huge issue in this country. It's a massive issue in my electorate and it is absolutely broken.
I'd like to give you an example: in Wentworth at the moment, we looked to see some listings on affordable housing. We had two, and they were in the neighbouring electorate of Sydney. One was for $750 a week, another for $813 a week.
That's around an annual cost of $39,000 a year. These were 'affordable' housing—one-bedroom flats requiring an individual a combined income of 130 grand post tax to account for less than 30 per cent of the tenant's income. One property even specifies that a household composition must be of only one person, with that minimum requirement of income eligibility of 130 grand.
This is why people are cynical about affordable housing in an area like mine. My community knows. In Wentworth, I spoke to an aged-care provider.
They said they find it as hard to get aged-care workers in Wentworth as they do in some regional and remote places, because it is so expensive to live there or live near there. So affordable housing is critical. But, if you have 'affordable' housing which is almost 40 grand a year in rent, it's not affordable, it's not realistic for these key workers and it's, frankly, just a ruse to make everyone feel good and for developers to have an excuse to put up bigger properties.
It is time for the government to act. I appreciate the member for Bradfield for bringing this forward. She's been in parliament for just over a year and she's got onto this issue already.
The government has been in power now for over four years, says it cares about these things and has not acted. The state government has also been here. I wrote to Rose Jackson in October last year, saying, 'Get onto this.
This is a mess. It doesn't pass the pub test,' and the state government hasn't acted either. So everyone talks about housing.
It is a really serious issue. I know that this government is serious that they want to fix it. Well, get with the program and start focusing on affordable housing.
Start making affordable housing actually affordable to the people who need it—to the nurses, to the teachers, to the people that make our communities work. There is support for affordable housing that actually makes a difference to those communities, but there is deep cynicism for 'affordable housing', which is just housing-washing to say higher rents and higher development.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): The time allocated for this debate has now expired. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made in order of the day for the next sitting.