ADJOURNMENT

Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (16:32): I'm honoured to deliver a speech this evening that was written by Kade, a 16-year-old South Australian, as part of the Raise Our Voice in Parliament campaign. It's a delight to welcome Kade and his mum, Brooke, all the way from Port Pirie and from the school St Mark's College. It's a long way to travel to bring your words to this place.

Kade says: A significant issue shaping my future and others, is housing affordability. Young Australians are being asked to work harder than ever before for opportunities that are further away. My parent's generation could work and save to realise the great Australian Dream of buying a home, start a family, and build a secure and safe future.

In 2026, young people are not sure if these opportunities will exist. With rising house costs, increasing expenses, and job uncertainties challenging the way my generation is thinking about life and their futures. This speech isn't about 'getting money'.

It's about gaining hope and security for our futures. It's about believing that hard work is going to translate to securing economic stability. I propose that parliament consider long term decisions that put our futures, and future generations at the centre of policy making.

Investing in affordable housing, strengthening education systems, and providing more training and learning opportunities will support young people to believe they have a genuine chance at realising the great Australian Dream. My generation is left wondering, are we working hard enough? We are.

My question is, "Will the opportunities that built Australia still be available to future generations?". Thank you, Kade, for your speech, for your thoughtfulness and for bringing to this Senate today the wishes and thoughts of you and your generation—year 11 at St Mark's College in Port Pirie. They are very important sentiments to bring here.

As someone who has recently completed a tour of the whole of our country—talking to young people, to organisations and to academics about what's going on in our housing market—I can tell you that your sentiments are spot-on. We need a long-term plan. We need both major parties—everyone in the Senate and this parliament—to look to the future of our 16-year-olds.

Will they be able to afford a home, when their wages now are so much less than the house prices they confront? Will they be able to save a deposit, when the average rent in our country now is over $700 a week? As we talked about today, there is so little rental accommodation in a place like Port Pirie.

House prices across our regional towns, like Port Pirie, are really through the roof. It didn't used to be like this. It used to be that you could find a house in country towns across our nation.

I know that, in Lameroo, the little town I grew up in, there were always vacant properties, and you could afford the rent, and you could afford to get into them if you saved your money. That is not possible now across our country. House prices are up by 400 per cent since 1999, driving a stake into the aspirations and hopes of so many young people like Kade, and causing great worry and concern for people like Brooke, his mum.

We want to see our kids into secure housing because secure housing is the foundation for a decent life. It's the basis of finding a job. You need a good home to be able to put yourself through uni and education.

You need the stability of rental accommodation if you're going to get a qualification. We know that, if you're going to hold down a job, have a career and start a family, the building block, the foundation for it, is a home. For too many Australians—for the third of Australians who are renters—accumulating a deposit, which used to take around six years on average across our country, now takes 12 years.

It's incredibly hard for young people, often with accumulating HECS debts, to look optimistically out from their lives and have a confident hope that they will have a home from which to start their families. So I say to Kade and his generation: don't stop hoping. Don't stop asking this parliament to respond to your wishes, which are just the same as the wishes that my generation and many generations before had: the chance for a secure household, the chance to accumulate a deposit and get into a home, the chance to be able to afford a mortgage and the chance not to have an overwhelming HECS debt which means running into further debt makes life very, very stressful.

Best of luck with your law degree, Kade. We look forward to seeing you back here in the future.