DOCUMENTS
Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (12:12): I also rise to take note of Minister Ayres's response on behalf of the Minister for Housing. The minister has an order for the production of documents and comes here yet again this morning hiding behind public interest immunity, failing to come clean with the workings which underpin a significant part of Labor's policy—an inadequate policy, an inadequate response to our housing crisis.
Last week, last time we were here, we were told it was 'wilful and puerile'. This morning, today, he says he's forced to listen to 'dishonest propositions about housing'. This is the biggest crisis facing our country.
Many thousands of Australians are living in cars or under bridges. They can't get into housing. A third of them rent properties which are unaffordable.
They're in deep crisis and unable to pay for the groceries they need, and yet the minister comes here this morning and talks about 'dishonest propositions around housing'. Labor's five per cent deposit scheme deserves to have its full workings put before us so we can understand why and how it came about. We also need to better understand its implications into the future, because we are in a housing crisis like we've never seen before in living memory—no-one can deny it—and we know we need action.
We need action that goes beyond a five per cent deposit scheme that has driven prices up and increased the risk of high levels of debt for people very early in their working lives. We've seen renters across Australia, without the action that we need, hit with a 23 per cent rent increase over the past five years, while real wages under Labor have fallen by five per cent.
Renters are being absolutely smashed by unlimited rent increases, and the weekly shop just keeps going up and up. The minister referred to the increased protections for renters that his government has delivered. He has not supported renters.
His government has failed renters across our country. I've talked to renters from Perth to Melbourne—across the nation. They are battling.
They are battling levels of rent that place them in really significant crises in their households and in those families. Of those receiving working-age income support payments, 97 per cent renting privately are in housing stress by any definition. This is completely unacceptable.
And the minister boasts about his government's achievements for renters. What a bizarre set of statements! More than half of those renters are paying over 50 per cent of their income in rent, significantly above the 30 per cent threshold for housing stress.
In a wealthy country like ours, women and kids should not be sleeping in cars because of a failure of government to deliver a decent housing policy and to come clean to this Senate with the workings behind their housing policies. Our so-called affordable housing system is anything but. 'Affordable housing' is a scam. It has definitions that benefit developers, and they are diverse definitions across our country.
When so-called affordable housing is set at the market rate in a housing crisis where housing prices have increased by 400 per cent in the past three decades—that is not affordable by anyone's definition. Tying household affordability to market rates when they're out of control is ridiculous. It is wrong and it's disadvantaging millions of Australians.
And, after the 25-year subsidy period ends for those so-called affordable housings, these so-called homes of affordability will transition back to market housing. Fake affordable housing built by private property developers is not going to solve the housing crisis. We need public housing.
Where are the propositions coming forward from Labor? They are not there. Instead, today we celebrate the five-year anniversary of the most massively poorly structured spend in AUKUS, which is going to cost billions of dollars, and we cannot fix a housing crisis for the millions of Australians seeking a roof over their heads.
The government's primary funding vehicle for social and affordable housing, the HAFF, is failing. It's too slow. It's too small.
It's too complicated. We need real solutions from Labor, and we need our state governments—Labor in Melbourne and in Sydney—to stop knocking down public housing and come forward to this Senate, to this parliament, with solutions that will actually deliver for those many families who are living in serious stress that is shaping the lives of so many kids into the future.
If you haven't got a roof over your head, it's really hard to hold down a job. It's really hard to get access to the health and education that you know you and your family need. We need to see a minister who comes to this chamber and tells us about their policies, shows us the workings and delivers on a policy that really assists those Australians in severe crisis.
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