STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (13:50): The collapse of Bathla Group, the housing developer, shows why Australia needs a public developer for our housing crisis. Private developer Bathla Group owes over $3.4 billion to around 3,000 creditors. They have over 14,000 homes stalled in their building pipeline.

So many people have been left feeling betrayed, feeling devastated and without a home, like Janice, who paid her deposit years ago, and Donna, whose Bathla home was her retirement plan. Hundreds of jobs have been lost, and the remaining workers and contractors are owed very large amounts of money. Some of them have gone without their wages for up to eight weeks.

People's entire savings are on the line. Homeowners and workers impacted by Bathla's collapse must be protected. This is what's wrong with our housing system—when housing is designed primarily for profit, instead of being treated as a basic human right.

This just shows why Australia needs a very large and significant public developer instead of private developers profiteering off a housing crisis. Private developers maximise returns and rip off ordinary hardworking people, and those for-profit developers will not solve our housing crisis. The government needs to go back into the business of building homes directly.

They did it after World War II when they built 25 per cent of all homes nationally, and we can do it again. It's time we put homes before profits. We need to do three things.

Firstly, we need a massive investment in the scale of public housing. Secondly, we need to cap rents so the third of Australians who are renters are protected. Thirdly, we need a well-built, publicly owned property developer to build homes that are rented and sold affordably to the thousands of Australians in a housing crisis today.