2021-03-18
By Adam Bandt
A few years ago, I was sitting at one of my local listening posts, and someone called Penny came along and said: 'I've never before been to one of these things where you sit down and talk with your local politician, but I just wanted to come and talk about how tough things are. I just don't think politicians understand that things in Australia have changed so much that you can now do the right thing, look for a job, get a job, find yourself working casual arrangements and insecure work even after you've gone and studied and got a degree, and still not be able to afford a stable roof over your head.' She was struggling to hold back the tears as she said: 'Don't politicians understand? If you can't create a system where all of us are guaranteed a roof over our heads, what is the whole point of it?' She was right, and Penny's words have stayed with me throughout the years I have been in this place.
Housing in Australia is absolutely cooked. In a wealthy country like ours, everyone should have a roof over their head, especially those lucky enough to find work. But we have a situation at the moment where, even if you find work, you can't be guaranteed to be able to afford to rent or even buy a house within a reasonable distance of where you work, let alone if you happen to find yourself being one of those two million people who either don't have a job or don't have enough hours of work.
Why is this the case? It's the case because the government is taking billions of dollars of public money and using it to push up the price of houses in this country. First home buyers or aspiring first home buyers are going along to auctions and finding themselves outbid by someone who already owns two, three, four or five homes because they know they can write off the loss as a tax loss. If you already have a house—or two, or three, or four of them—the government will write you a cheque to go and buy more, which pushes up the price and makes it harder for first home buyers to get into the market.
Meanwhile, the cost of rent goes up and up and up. One of the key things that governments could do to bring down rents and make sure housing is more affordable is to build more public housing. If you build more public housing, you deal with waiting lists. In my state of Victoria, it's getting towards 100,000 people waiting for a roof over their heads. Every day in my office I find myself talking to mothers who have been on the public housing waiting list for years, who are couch surfing with kids and are homeless—the definition of homeless. They are homeless, and they still cannot find a space in public housing because we haven't built enough public housing. If we invested in public housing, we'd not only create jobs and help recover from the pandemic by giving jobs to people and apprentices but we'd help reduce inequality in this country. It would also help bring down rents for everyone else because we'd be introducing a whole lot of stock at the lower end of the housing market, which would make rents cheaper for first home buyers and people who are looking to get into the market in the first place.
So, as we recover from this pandemic, and as we deal with the housing crisis in Australia, what we need to do is to stop giving tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and stop giving tax breaks and public money to people who have already got three, four, five, six or seven houses, and instead use it to invest to build large-scale public housing in this country. If we had the courage to invest to build a million new public homes in this country, if we were to wind back some of the unfair tax breaks for the big corporations and billionaires who don't need them and instead put that money into building public housing, it would create in the order of 80,000 jobs and 8,000 apprenticeships, help solve the housing crisis we have in this country and bring down rent for young people who are struggling to get into the market and save that deposit.
There's a solution to all of this. It's a win-win-win. If you go to the doctor and the doctor says, 'You have three things wrong with you, and I can give you a medicine that fixes one or I can give you a medicine that fixes all three,' you take the medicine that fixes all three. That's why the Greens are saying that the key to recovering from the recession we are coming out of, reducing inequality in this country and ensuring that, in a wealthy country like ours, everyone has a roof over their head is to wind back the tax breaks, make the billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share of tax, and use the money to invest in nation-building, job-creating projects that will cut inequality, like building public housing.