Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know that, when it comes to housing, the kids are not okay. My kids and their friends are facing huge struggles to find and afford a rental property right across Greater Sydney, and it isn't just our adult children. It's not only students, single mums and older women. We're also talking about full-time working Australians: teachers, aged-care workers, early educators, and ambos and others in emergency services, like police officers. When I look at so many of the properties people queue up to see—the crumbling walls, the mould, collapsing ceilings, the light fittings barely hanging on, rarely a flyscreen in sight and draughts from gaps in doors and windows, let alone any decent heating or cooling—it really is a crisis. Then you look at what people are asked to pay for these places, and it's a scandal. The data backs the lived experience, and these are some of the things that in this budget we're taking steps to start to tackle.

In Sydney and Melbourne, rental markets are extremely tight, with the number of available properties falling rapidly over the past year, driving advertised rents increasingly high. Almost 95 per cent of new tenants who signed leases in February 2023 were charged more rent than the previous tenant at the same property had paid, with close to 70 per cent of new tenants copping more than a 10 per cent rent increase. About 70 per cent of existing tenants whose leases came up for renewal in February were hit with a rent rise, up from just 14 per cent a couple of years before. Many who are struggling to hang on in the rental market are the people who kept us going during the pandemic and who worked so hard for us day in and day out. I know from my local food charities that the numbers are increasing, that increases in both mortgages and rent have stretched budgets to breaking point and that, if you want to keep the payments going, you need to be able to access cheap food from somewhere. More than ever we need places full of volunteers like Junction 142, Hawkesbury's Helping Hands, the Salvos and the many, many church and community groups.

So we do know things are not okay, and that's why this budget is doing things to tackle them. Unlike previous governments, we're not going to gaslight people and pretend that everything is fine. We're going to talk about these issues. We take seriously the circumstances we've inherited and the consequences of decisions made over many years to ignore the issue of housing. I remember that in 2013, before he was elected Prime Minister, the then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, made no mention of homelessness or housing affordability as an issue, nor did he have a housing and homelessness minister, nor did his successor. It wasn't until 2019 that the Liberals even bothered to appoint a minister to the housing portfolio.

Back in 2013, the then Minister for Housing, Brendan O'Connor, now the Minister for Skills and Training, highlighted the investment Labor had made in its two terms in office: $20 billion in housing affordability and homelessness services and programs, and a direct financial contribution to one in every 20 homes built, including 21,000 social housing homes and 11,000 affordable rental homes, with another 30,000 in the pipeline when we left office. Why is that relevant? Well, what it shows is Labor's long-term commitment to housing and home affordability, whether it's renting or buying. It shows this is not an issue we ignore when we're in government. It's not a problem we leave until it's a crisis. It's not something we choose to sweep under the carpet. As we did in previous governments, we are taking it seriously now and pulling all the levers in our power to bring change to something that was a crisis some time ago.

Let's look at the whole suite of things our most recent budget contains to tackle the multiple elements of what people are facing. For a start, we want to see more homes built. One way we will do this is the Housing Australia Future Fund. That's being held up in the Senate right now. It's a $10 billion fund which is the single-biggest investment in social and affordable housing by a federal government in more than a decade, and it will build 30,000 new rental homes in the first five years. But it is dependent on support, and the opposition won't support it and, to date, there is not enough support in the Senate to pass that bill.

But that is just one of a number of big initiatives that are included in the recent budget. There is $2 billion for more affordable rental housing through the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation, which provides low-cost, longer-term loans to registered community housing providers to support the provision of more social and affordable housing. It offers concessional loans, grants and equity funding for housing development. That adds to the $575 million of funding that we took last year, that was just sitting unused by the former government. That means there are now projects under construction because of that funding. These are homes that will be owned in perpetuity by state governments or registered community providers and will be provided to key workers and people who need them most, at concessional rates.

That is in addition to the negotiation of a new housing accord, which is allocated $350 million to deliver an additional 10,000 affordable rental homes over five years from 2024, and the increase to the Affordable Housing Bond Aggregator, which will support another 7,000 homes. If you add the housing fund to this, it is twice as much as was delivered between 2011 and 2021 from all tiers of government combined. We have big ambitions for this, and the work is already starting to happen on the ground, but we know there is so much more to do. That's why these funds and the work we do with them is so important.

We also have tax incentives to increase the supply of rental housing by improving the taxation arrangements for investments in build-to-rent housing. Increasing the depreciation rate from 2.5 per cent to four per cent per year for eligible new build-to-rent projects where construction commences after 9 May 2023 might not be the most exciting thing for people to hear, but if you're looking at the numbers that's an increased incentive to be part of build-to-rent investment—as is reducing the withholding tax for eligible fund payments from managed investment trusts to foreign residents on income from newly constructed residential build-to-rent properties, which will kick in after 1 July 2024, from 30 per cent to 15 per cent subject to further consultation—and there will be an eligibility criteria to it. Those things are not going to make headlines; they're not going to be on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. But they are really practical steps to incentivise private investment into this market so that we're building long-term sustainable housing from a variety of sources.

We know that housing isn't something we do alone at the federal level. The minister has brought the states and territories together to agree to expedite zoning, planning and land release for social and affordable housing. Local governments have agreed to deliver planning reforms and free up land holdings. Institutional investors have agreed to leverage investment, and the construction sector peak bodies have discussed agreeing to support high-energy efficiency rating construction, the training of more apprentices under an extended Australian Skills Guarantee and working to make housing more responsive to demand.

We are leading the push for reforms to support renters' rights, with states and territories committing to work to strengthen renters' rights. We're also helping those who need it most desperately with the largest increase in rent assistance in more than 30 years, with an extra $67 million to states and territories to help tackle homelessness as part of the $1.6 billion that is the one new extension of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement.

Of course, we want to see people buy their own homes, and so far, in the 12 months since the election, we've helped more than 50,000 Australians into homeownership. This includes more than 6,000 through the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee since it was launched in October, three months ahead of schedule. Places are still available under the Home Guarantee Scheme before the end of the financial year. The budget expands eligibility for the scheme from 1 July to allow friends or siblings and other family members to make joint applications. The criteria for the Family Home Guarantee are being expanded to recognise single legal guardians of children, such as aunts, uncles and grandparents, and that means that from 1 July more people will have the opportunity to own a home sooner. So they're the key things that we've done—the decisions and actions we've taken—in the first 12 months of being in government. We know there is more to do, and we will continue doing it.

I want to turn to another key initiative in the budget: fee-free TAFE. More than 65,000 students in New South Wales have enrolled in fee-free TAFE so far this year. The joint Commonwealth-state initiative is encouraging a wide range of applicants, especially women, who make up up to 60 per cent of all enrolments. Some are studying in traditionally male dominated fields. Enrollees also include young people, jobseekers, people living with disabilities and First Nations people. Almost a third of enrolments have been in courses related to the care sector: child care, aged care, nursing and disability support care—all areas of high priority. But we're also seeing cybersecurity and construction being taken up in large numbers.

This uptake is part of the 180,000 fee-free places we delivered for 2023, recognising last year the urgency of the skills crisis that we'd been left with, and we'll keep doing it, to broaden access to education and to fix skills shortages. There are another 300,000 fee-free TAFE and VET places available in high-skill-needs areas from next year, and I would really urge young people and people who want to retrain to go and look at what is available. We have incredible TAFEs in Wentworth Falls and Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and in Richmond in the Hawkesbury. Between them, they offer a wide range of courses, but we're also close to so many of the other TAFE campuses.

TAFE is an area that is fundamental to developing the skill set that we need in our future workers. It's a very different way of studying from what I know kids experience at school, and I really commend my local schools, who work hard to encourage students to investigate TAFE. For some people in my community, it's an easy step to take. They have family members who've been to TAFE and done VET studies. For others, it's something different for their families. But what I see when I look at what's available, whether it's on our campuses or on neighbouring campuses, is a whole range of professional qualifications that put you in really good stead for the jobs of the future, and that's the sort of focus that this government has. We want to look at people accessing that fee-free TAFE.

We also want people to think about the university courses where we've identified that there are opportunities. One of the things I'm working hard to see is greater collaboration between the Western Sydney University campus we have locally and the TAFE students. A perfect example of where the skills provided by both are needed is the agribusiness tech hub that we are building there. This was one of my election commitments. It's being delivered in the budget. The funding is in the budget. What it means is that we need people—some with science qualifications, as well as engineers and the people who can construct these big glasshouses to be able to do incredible work. So bringing together the range of skills we have is going to be the key to moving forward, and certainly, on the Hawkesbury campuses of Western Sydney University and the TAFE, we're very well placed to do that. I commend the budget to the House.

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