Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by celebrating the fact that, contrary to the member for Indi's disparaging comments about the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee, we have secured 2,700 homes in six months. It's an absolutely fantastic outcome. It demonstrates the power of federal government investment in affordable homes and being able to provide access and a guarantee to young people looking to continue living in the regions or to move to those regions.

While my electorate is not quite as regional as the member for Gilmore's, the outer reaches of Hasluck are some 55 to 60 kilometres from Perth's CBD and are in what can only be described as farming country. Having grown up in regional towns, predominantly York, which is only about a 20-minute drive from the border of my electorate, I completely appreciate the need to support younger people and young families, first home buyers, who desire to stay in their own home town and raise their family or perhaps to stay at a job that they love but still have the capacity to buy their own first home.

We see this also with the growth in opportunities for renewable energies that will predominantly be benefiting those in the regions. The lovely town of Collie has been the home of coalmining for decades. Now the Western Australian government, under the McGowan leadership, is transitioning Western Australia away from coal. That is not the end of the town; it's the beginning of an entirely new future. Jobs will come now from renewable energies, green hydrogen and developing tourism. Tourism has been completely unappreciated because of the coalmining that has been there for so long. We now have an opportunity for a lot more people to move to that region. Their capacity to access affordable homes is limited. Programs like the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee make it accessible to all.

There are also a great many people deciding to make metropolitan parts of my electorate of Hasluck home. Around 55 per cent of the people in Hasluck have a mortgage, which is over 20 per cent higher than the national average. These are younger people, first-generation migrants to Australia, people chasing the Australian dream and those simply moving in because it's a beautiful place in which to live. The Albanese Labor government has been active in this space, as we heard already, with the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee, the Help to Buy Scheme, the National Housing Accord and—with the support, hopefully, of all those opposite—the Housing Future Fund.

In a complex society we all bear the shared responsibility for ensuring that everyone lives with dignity and security. With the leadership of the federal government and agreement with the states we can indeed meet this challenge, because no-one needs a mansion on the riverfront, but everyone needs sufficient shelter. For everyone to have sufficient shelter in the shadow of an often unaffordable housing market there needs to be sufficient funding. The government's current policies need to be seen as a great beginning and they need to be supported by the parliament.

Of course, 'sufficient shelter' means different things at different times of life and has different meanings depending on the circumstances. During the campaign I met families who were in a difficult situation because the number of rooms within their home didn't reflect the size of their family. And it went both ways: I had some people who were terrified about trying to find a smaller home because of the lack of available small homes with one or two bedrooms, and, equally, there were those with growing families who were desperately concerned that moving out of their one- or two-bedroom flat would be difficult, if not impossible, because of the increasing rents—let alone being able to actually purchase a home that fitted the size of their family.

So this government are now making it easier for people to downsize, and we're make it easier for people to remove themselves from circumstances such as domestic violence. We're beginning to actually address the systemic needs, which means investing in homelessness services and housing supply. The Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023 enables grants and loans in relation to acute housing needs, social housing or affordable housing, and we look forward to that bill being passed, because the future benefits of establishing this are unlimited in scope. It is a legacy program, not unlike Medicare or superannuation, which could, over time, become an integral and supportive part of Australia's housing landscape. We have a major, ambitious program ahead of us, but we need the parliament to act in this area, because any delay is an absolute injustice to all those who deserve and require the basics of shelter and affordable housing.

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