Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Can I thank the member Aston for her question. She knows what it is like to grow up, to raise a family, and to work and live within our great suburbs across this country. Just over a year ago, the Australian people elected the Albanese Labor government to restore a national vision for our cities and our suburbs, and we are getting on with the work of doing just that.

Our government knows just how critical our cities are, driving national productivity, contributing to our cultural identity and housing two in every three Australians. We want every city and every suburb to be an excellent place to live, with equitable access to the jobs, housing, services and infrastructure that every Australian deserves. That is why our recent budget delivered significant investment in our cities and suburbs. We are producing a national urban policy framework which will once again put the Commonwealth at the heart of and into the business of shaping our great cities and suburbs. The work will be guided by experts in design, planning, sustainability, property and housing via the new Urban Policy Forum headed up by the fabulous Professor Barbara Norman. It will work hand in hand with state, territory and local governments to deliver a truly national vision. We are reconvening the planning ministers, alongside my ministerial colleagues from around the country, to work on issues around housing supply and affordability, climate change, communications and urban environments.

We're delivering real investments in our cities, with a new community infrastructure grants program for our cities, suburbs and periurban communities, the Thriving Suburbs Program. For the first time in recent memory, every single part of Australia has a transparent, open and merits based program to apply for community infrastructure that they need. We are establishing a new Precincts and Partnerships Program to invest in city-shaping precincts which deliver significant benefits to our cities. We are looking to fund best-practice projects from innovative industrial precincts supporting new ways of working to mixed-use communities while delivering the housing, cultural and commercial opportunities for our cities' needs. These partnerships will be led by communities because we know that nobody knows our cities and suburbs better than the people who call them home. We will make these investments through a transparent process with publicly available guidelines so communities aren't pitted against each other for funding decisions made behind closed doors. Our cities are amongst the best in the world, but we know they can be even better. Those opposite left a policy vacuum when it came to the cities agenda and the cities space, with their Cities Reference Group last meeting in 2019.

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