The Australian Greens have welcomed Treasurer Joe Hockey's attempts to contribute to the debate on tax reform and housing affordability, and encouraged him to continue offering free advice to people struggling to stay afloat in Australia's overheated housing market.

"In bringing forward our proposal to abolish Negative Gearing, the Greens have sought to highlight the unfairness of tax concessions flowing to property investors at the expense of renters and first home buyers," Australian Greens housing spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam said.

The Australian Greens have today announced a policy package to reform negative gearing and use the proceeds to boost affordable housing, building more than 14,500 new homes for our most vulnerable.

The policy package, released today by Senator Scott Ludlam, proposes to remove negative gearing for new investment properties and invest the proceeds in social and public housing instead.

"Low and middle-income Australians should not be forced to subsidise property investors through their taxes - it is fundamentally unfair," Senator Ludlam said today.

Under questioning from the Greens Spokesperson for Finance, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, the Treasury Secretary John Fraser said that, for Sydney and parts of Melbourne, the housing market was ‘unequivocally’ a bubble.

When Senator Whish-Wilson later questioned the Reserve Bank, Assistant Governor Malcolm Edey added that “…a lot of people do think it’s a bubble – serious people think that – and we agree that this is a situation where the market is strong, it’s overheated, it’s a risky situation…”

A Greens' report on the uptake of home solar photovoltaic (PV) power has found WA householders have installed equivalent capacity to two coal-fired power stations, exposing the state government's lack of planning and preparedness as people act to reduce household power bills.

A Senate Inquiry has today tabled its timely report on the housing affordability and homelessness crisis facing Australia, making a range of practical proposals for making housing more affordable.

Australian Greens deputy leader Senator Scott Ludlam participated in the Senate Economics References Committee report into Affordable Housing.

"This is an evidence-based, substantive report that clearly sets out the reality that we have the tools at hand to deal with the housing affordability crisis," Senator Ludlam said today.

Transcript - Housing Affordability 

The Greens have noted the release of the Anglicare Rental Affordability Snapshot, which paints a really grim picture of the catastrophically unaffordable state of housing for the nation's renters.

A third of Australian households are rental households, and many people, particularly young people, have given up on the thought of ever owning their own home.

The Australian Greens have called for the federal government to reverse half a billion dollars of cuts to housing affordability and homelessness services and rethink its blinkered opposition to reforming negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions that have artificially inflated property prices.

Anglicare's National Rental Affordability Snapshot for 2015 was released today, showing a severe rental affordability crisis for Australians on low and fixed incomes or income support payments.