With rapidly rising rents and mortgage repayments, housing is becoming unaffordable for many people. Greens candidate for Keira Kit Docker has spoken with several Illawarra housing and homelessness service providers in the last fortnight and believes that the NSW government can do much more to alleviate this problem.

With rapidly rising rents and mortgage repayments, housing is becoming unaffordable for many people. Greens candidate for Keira Kit Docker has spoken with several Illawarra housing and homelessness service providers over the last fortnight, and believes the NSW government can do much more to alleviate this problem.

“The state of housing in the Illawarra is unacceptable,” said Mr Docker. “Our local homeless and housing organisations see thousands of people in our region trying to access services which are already at capacity. Families are being priced out of a home, unable to keep up with the cost of living.

“It’s time government treated housing as a fundamental human right rather than a vessel for investment and profit. We can do this by ensuring that there are more affordable homes and larger public housing stock.

“If elected to our state's parliament I will push the government to introduce real and substantive solutions. For too long we've seen developers given special treatment and tax concessions by successive governments.

“The Greens are committed to seeing all new large developments consisting of at least 30 percent long-term affordable housing.

“I also want to see more public and affordable housing stock introduced by increasing taxes on big property investors and trophy homes.”

Jenny Leong MP, Member for Newtown and Greens Housing and Homelessness Spokesperson, said:

“We’re in a housing crisis that has locked people out of ever owning their own home, left people waiting up to 10 years for public housing, and seen rents rise four times faster than wages.

“A crisis this big needs radical reform that puts renters, first home buyers, and public housing tenants first – and ends the years of special treatment for dodgy dev and big investors.

“The Greens want to radically transform our housing system with reform that recognises housing should fundamentally be about people having homes, not wealth generation for investors.”