Page 1325 - Week 04 - Thursday, 5 May 2022
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for you to buy your fifth home than to buy your first home. We do not have enough social and public housing. We have a growing population and changing demographics. We have got vacant properties sitting there that could be homes but are not. We have delays in the construction sector and supply chains. We have new business models springing up that provide short-term rentals, like Airbnb, that are disrupting the market.
The problem is really complex, and the solutions are also complex, and we have quite a lot of them already underway. We are making a huge investment in public and social housing. We are putting in over $1.2 billion to grow and renew our public housing stock. We have dedicated at least 15 per cent of the annual residential land release program to affordable community and public housing. We have offered the Land Rent Scheme to people. That lets you rent land rather than buying it to build a home. We have offered the Home Buyer Concession Scheme to eligible participants so that they can buy land or a home with no stamp duty, or they can do both of those things.
We have also waived land tax for home owners who rent their properties at less than 75 per cent of market rent through a registered community housing provider. I want to pause on this one. This was a measure introduced by Greens member Caroline Le Couteur. It is an interesting scheme and a really good one. The Greens understand that a lot of our problems are caused by the fact that we have turned housing into an investment, and we have moved away from looking at housing as a home. That means that some people have lots and lots of houses and some people have no home at all. It is a broken system. But this scheme is a great way to combine investment and homes. You can use this scheme to make your financial investment somebody else’s home. It is so effective, and I would encourage anybody who is a landlord or a potential landlord to look at this scheme.
We have more solutions on the way. We have committed to funding for homelessness, with an investment of over $12 million so far. I know that Minister Vassarotti is really connected to this work. She has been working on it for a long time, and it is very satisfying for her to bring this work to fruition. We have build-to-rent affordable housing coming in the form of Common Ground Gungahlin and Dickson. We have supported the establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander controlled community housing provider and we have committed to delivering an additional 600 affordable homes by 2025-26.
The Greens understand that there are always new ideas, and we are always looking for new ideas. My colleague Mr Davis has brought forward a couple of good motions recently that we are looking at. We are looking at vacancy rates, because we understand that if there are properties that are vacant—properties that could be somebody’s home—we need to understand why they are not somebody’s home. What is going on there, where are they and what do we do about it? He has also brought on a motion about short-term rentals, Airbnbs. It is good when we start looking at these other ideas, but unfortunately we are not seeing new ideas from the Canberra Liberals; we are seeing the same ideas that have already been looked at in depth and dismissed on sound financial, economic and environmental grounds recycled over and over.
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