Tuesday, 31 October 2023

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (13:46): Australia’s rental vacancy rate has just hit an all-time low of 1.1 per cent. On the weekend I met a couple whose rent had recently gone up from $500 a week to $580 a week. This means property investors are just putting up the rent as high as they like; their house did not get 16 per cent better. As reported on the Onion website, ‘Landlord forced to raise rent due to thinking of bigger number’. Labor recently announced some housing policy in September which relies upon the private sector to build more homes. Unfortunately, it also involves demolishing government-owned public housing towers and replacing them with private housing and a net increase of an average of 16 social homes per year. With a public housing waiting list of 125,000 people, we are getting an average of 16 more social homes per year. There is so little ambition in this policy that the Greens cannot support it. The rental crisis will get worse if this is the best that Labor has to offer. Labor must rein in these unlimited rent increases and build more public housing rather than destroying it.