Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

I am almost speechless to hear representatives of the former government that presided over 12 years of inactivity and inaction on housing affordability and homelessness now getting up and urging a new government in office for six months to do more on an issue that they ignored for over a decade. The extraordinary hide of the shadow minister getting up and saying we have done nothing—when we have spent $150 million already on crisis accommodation, have backed RecLink Australia to roll out their programs nationally, have backed the soccer Homeless World Cup, have released our green paper on homelessness and are now anticipating a white paper in September, which is a very fast turnaround time for anyone who understands how the green paper and white paper process works—after 12 years of neglect by the previous government, is absolutely extraordinary.

We see it also in these arguments about the first home saver accounts. I think the shadow minister’s most damning indictment was when she said, ‘We have a responsibility to fix this.’ What a damning indictment of the previous government. Yes, there is a housing affordability crisis that the shadow minister mentioned half-a-dozen times or a dozen times in her speech. Did this housing affordability crisis evolve in six months? Was housing perfectly affordable on 25 November last year but now, suddenly, there is a housing affordability crisis? This crisis has evolved because we have not been building enough homes—I perfectly agree with the shadow minister on that. We are 30,000 homes short. The shadow minister believes that this is probably an underestimate. I think it is probably an underestimate too. How many years has this been going on? What action did the previous government take to improve housing affordability? Name one thing. Impossible.

We have had various criticisms. The first that the shadow minister raised when she started speaking in our past sitting period was that money saved through the first home saver accounts would be capitalised into higher housing prices. That is curious because that was not the approach the previous government took when they introduced the first home owners grant. They did not believe that at the time. There is a very clear difference between the first home saver accounts and the first home owners grant. The first home savers account, as the shadow minister understands, has a minimum lock-in period that she has also criticised. They have a minimum lock-in period because we do not want this extra money to flow through in one lump and push up housing prices. That is a design feature for the very reason that we do not want additional money punching the market all in one go and pushing up house prices.

Many people who start saving in their first home saver accounts this year will not be ready to buy a house in four or five years time. It might take them six, seven or eight years to save a deposit, so we will not have the inflationary impact of all of this money coming through at once. We also give ourselves the time to start to address some of the critical—(Quorum formed) The shadow minister several times made a point about this government not doing enough to address housing supply. I really need to take issue with this. The first home saver account is one measure out of a range of measures such as the Housing Affordability Fund, the National Rental Affordability Scheme and the reforms that we are engaging in with our state and local government colleagues. All of these are designed to begin to turn around the critical housing supply shortage we have.

We have a housing supply shortage. The shadow minister is absolutely right in saying that. And the reason that we are engaging with the housing affordability problem in a range of ways is so that we help young people save a deposit for their first home and also make sure that there are more affordable homes being built. That is what the Housing Affordability Fund and the National Rental Affordability Scheme will help with.

The shadow minister also said that the first home saver account will increase demand. That means more young people will want to buy their first homes. What a scandalous idea: that more young people would want to buy their first homes! If this increases demand for first homes then I will be the first to be pleased about that. We have seen a declining proportion of all loans going to first home buyers because they have been priced out of the market, and a critical factor in that is that they cannot afford the deposit on their first home anymore. This is partly because they are paying so much more for their rent. So if demand goes up for first homes, I will be the first to be excited about that.

The shadow minister says this is a small measure. It is a modest measure. We think it will help about half a million people save a deposit for their first homes. I think that is substantial. The shadow minister argued that the measures here should be more tightly targeted. I think, from someone who was in a government where 270 millionaires were paid $3½ thousand each in family payments in the last two years, that an argument about tighter targeting is one that is difficult to sustain publicly.

She criticised the minimum lock-in period. The minimum lock-in period is vital because we want people to change their culture of saving. We also do not want a flood of money to hit the market before our supply measures begin to work. She was worried about what would happen to joint accounts when people split up. There are not any joint accounts, so we do not need to worry about that. She was worried about what would happen if the savings that people were making were outstripped by price increases. So the logical argument is that people should go now and borrow 100 per cent of the purchase price of a new home and get themselves into exactly the sort of trouble that we are seeing, with people defaulting on loans in record numbers, because we do not want people waiting around to save a deposit. That is the kookiest logic I have heard in some time when it comes to talking about saving a deposit.

The shadow minister puts all of the problems down to land supply, taxes and charges. According to her, it is all the fault of the states, it is all the fault of local government and there is nothing the previous government could have ever done from a federal level. It could not have released Commonwealth land like the states were asking, for example. It could not have done any of that.

I will finish commenting on the shadow minister’s points with this one last point. The shadow minister was critical of the Housing Affordability Fund and talked about how the $30 million for electronic development applications was for a website. She clearly misunderstands that this is about a substantial reform, not just to how people interact with the system but to the system itself, to give the ability to process applications much faster.

She mentioned that the Development Assessment Forum have been around since 1998. They gave the same advice to the previous government as they have given to us—that there needs to be massive reform—and we have actually taken that advice and started to move on it. The fact that they could not get anyone to listen to them for 10 years, the fact that the only measures in this area undertaken by the previous government had no accountability measures at all and the fact that they had no interoperability so that any changes made to electronic development around the states or between local government areas could not work together properly have not been mentioned at all.

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