Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very glad to speak on the Help to Buy Bill 2023, which establishes one of the key measures being put in place by the Albanese Labor government to address the sharp challenges in housing access and affordability in Australia. It's a big problem. We understand that. We're not turning away from it. We are taking it on, and, in the first 18 months of this government, we've put in place a significant package of measures to address what was neglected for the previous decade: access to safe and affordable housing. This is one of those measures, the Help to Buy bill, and we're putting it in place along with all the other measures, some of which I'll touch on in a bit, because we know that safe, secure and affordable housing is literally the foundation upon which our wellbeing depends.

As I've said before, the starkest measures of deprivation anywhere in the world, including in Australia, relate to the absence of safe and secure housing, which means the inability to live and sleep warmly and in peace. It means the lack of a place where you can prepare food and eat properly. It means the lack of a home base from which people can go to work and children can go off to school, and a home base to which people can return to and rest and be supported in the company of their family and housemates. Without safe and affordable housing, everything else in life is contingent and at risk: health, education, employment and social inclusion, and the opportunity to breathe out, to think about the future, to play, to love and to be loved. That's why safe and affordable housing is rightly considered a basic human right.

As I say, it is literally the steady ground under your feet; it is literally the roof over your head. That's why it's been a high priority and major focus for the Albanese government in our first term. It's why it was such a big part of our first full budget in May last year. And it needed to be, because, as I said, as in so many areas of Australian life, the Albanese federal Labor government are stepping back into an area that was woefully neglected for the nine years, the three terms, of government before us. It was a decade in many cases of nothing and in some cases of worse than nothing—not just neglect but the active undermining of the capacity for Australians to access safe and affordable housing.

In that cause, we are delivering the Help to Buy scheme. It's part of a wider package but an important measure in itself. The concept is very simple: the Albanese government, in partnership with state and territory governments, is going to assist low-income Australians to own a home by sharing the investment in that home with them. We know that there are significant barriers to homeownership, especially for younger and low-income Australians. We know that saving a deposit is hard when there are so many other cost pressures. We know that getting a loan is not easy. This scheme will assist by allowing government to take a share in the purchase of a home, thereby alleviating what is otherwise an obstacle that many Australians can't overcome.

The fact is that Western Australians don't need any convincing and probably don't need much explanation about the benefits and the value of shared-equity schemes because we've seen an approach of that kind in WA. We've seen how it assists people into housing and boosts homeownership, particularly for people who find that challenging. We've had the Keystart shared-equity program operating in WA since it was created by the Dowding Western Australian Labor government back in 1989. That's significant for me. I actually remember that—1989 was my last year of high school. My life up to that point involved relative insecurity of housing. I was talking to my brother and sister the other day, just reflecting on the fact that in my last four years of high school—I attended Swanbourne high school—we moved five times. We lived in five different houses in those four years. After my parents parted ways when I was young, my parents never owned a house again until after my father's parents died and he was able to purchase a home. My mum doesn't own a house to this day. We were a renting, single-parent household. That's just how it was in Fremantle at the time. It was a considerably more affordable place than it is now. It amazes me, in terms of the difference that my kids have experienced, to reflect on what that was like, to think that I lived in five different premises just over the last four years of high school.

Keystart has been a remarkable program in WA. As I say, it started in 1989. It's helped more than 120,000 Western Australians get into their own home through nearly 80,000 separate home loans over that period, accounting for $18.3 billion in total loan funding. Three-quarters of those loans went to people who were previously renting. So 75 per cent of people who benefited from a Keystart loan had been renting. Some of the other quarter probably weren't even renting in as much as they were probably still living with family or in some other kind of informal housing arrangement. Seventy-three per cent of the loans under the Keystart program, in the 35 years that it's been in operation, have been made to people between the ages of 20 and 40. So you can see that nearly three-quarters of those loans go to people in that younger age bracket, where we know people face those kinds of challenges.

There's just no doubt that shared-equity programs work. I'm going to quote something that Jessica Shaw, the Western Australian state Labor member for Swan Hills, said about Keystart because it can't really be said better:

In Keystart, the State has a commercially sustainable, low-deposit but not high-risk, lending business that sets people on the path to financial sustainability.

That's absolutely right. So it's fantastic that the Albanese Labor government is now creating, through this bill, a similar shared-equity opportunity in Help to Buy that—certainly, in my state—will amplify what's already been delivered through Keystart. As I've said, it's an important measure. It's far from being the only thing that we've done in the first 18 months of this government. We created the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, with some significant resistance from other parts of the parliament, unfortunately—both the coalition and the Greens as it turned out, strangely enough. That's $10 billion through the Housing Australia Future Fund. It will create 40,000 dwellings over five years, with 4,000 of those dedicated to supporting women and children fleeing domestic violence. I don't think anyone would argue that we don't need that kind of measure.

The Social Housing Accelerator is $2 billion to partner with states and territories in creating new or refurbished social housing dwellings. The Home Guarantee Scheme was stood up quickly. It's already helped more than 67,000 people into homeownership since we were elected in May 2022. That includes 9,000 in rural and regional Australia through the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee. As part of our focus on cost of living, which was the highest priority focus of our first full budget, we delivered the largest increase to Commonwealth rent assistance that had been provided in 30 years. So we know that housing is a significant cost pressure. As I said, it's really the principal cost pressure on any Australian household. We are doing a number of things that are specific to housing but also things that go to cost of living more broadly, noting that that makes a difference when it comes to people's capacity to afford safe and secure housing.

That assistance to Commonwealth rent assistance, as we discussed, was a bill about getting people into homeownership. We of course know that people who aren't in a position to buy at this stage are essentially facing the rental market, and the market is tough. That's why we're working with the states on the rules that help regulate rental tenancies so that people can receive fair treatment, can ensure that they're not facing unconscionable rent increases that pile up one after the other, can face other kinds of sharp dealing when it comes to trying to find a place to rent on a fair basis. To the extent that the Commonwealth can make a direct difference to the capacity of people to afford rental premises, we are providing, as I said, the largest increase to Commonwealth rent assistance in 30 years.

We also boosted the National Housing Infrastructure Facility, and that's significant because, last year, when the cabinet came to Western Australia, as the Prime Minister committed to doing, making sure that cabinet and key ministers spend time in WA following his commitment to be in the west as often as he can be, there was an announcement by the Prime Minister and the minister for housing, with their Western Australian counterparts, of an $88 million investment through the National Housing Infrastructure Facility for a new social and affordable housing project in central Perth. It's being undertaken in cooperation with the Cook WA Labor government. They are putting in about $45 million. It will create 200 new dwellings, including 66 social housing apartments and 44 affordable rental homes.

As we make the change, which I hope is supported across the board, it's worth remembering the scale of the challenge not just in the way that it is experienced by people who are struggling to buy or to rent. The scale of the challenge before us is partly created by relatively short medium-term circumstances, but the greatest contributor to it is the longer-term pattern of neglect.

I said before that you could look at the things that the coalition did and didn't do. You can call it neglect. You can say that it's a failure of omission inasmuch as a lot of the measures that the Rudd and Gillard governments put in place—Prime Minister Rudd had his own experience of housing insecurity and was therefore very committed to introducing a range of programs at the Commonwealth level that would address that. It wasn't just that the incoming Abbott government said: 'We'll take our hands off the wheel. There's nothing more to do here.' There was a series of steps that the former government took that made things worse. They got rid of the housing help for seniors pilot. Older Australians, who are least able to increase their income and, frankly, need safe and secure housing as much as anyone, benefited from the housing help for seniors pilot. That got the chop under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.

They tried to cut funding to community legal centres. Mercifully, that was resisted. Think about the work that community legal centres do in terms of tenancy support and advice. Think about how critical it is when people who are possibly facing eviction and finding themselves homeless are able to get that expert legal assistance and advice. The coalition government wanted to cut the knees out from under community legal centres, which certainly would have not just had acute, harmful impacts on individuals but also pushed greater costs onto every part of the system. We know that, when you don't prevent a person from being in crisis, the consequences after that, when they've been evicted, end up being much more costly than if they could have stayed in their home in the first place. The coalition government wasn't finished there. They defunded the homelessness and community housing peak bodies. They thought: 'We don't need peak bodies who are in the game of helping give advice on policy, of helping to represent some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged Australians. We will stop supporting the vital work that they do.'

They closed the National Rental Affordability Scheme, a key policy under the Rudd-Gillard government, and they abolished the National Housing Supply Council. The one thing that those opposite will say is: 'Don't worry about anything else. It's all about supply. Take the ropes off the animal spirits in the economy'—blah, blah, blah—'and it will all take care of itself.' Well, they abolished the National Housing Supply Council, the body that was put in place to help coordinate increases in supply, encourage local governments to look at their planning conditions and encourage state and territory governments to take the brakes off. That body, which was doing good work, was abolished by those opposite. We don't accept the circumstances that face people in Australia doing it tough when it comes to achieving what should be a basic human right: safe, secure and affordable housing, the foundation of everything. We don't accept that.

We are stepping back into that space. In short order the Minister for Housing has introduced a comprehensive range of measures and funding, because the neglect of the last 10 years can't be allowed to continue. The Commonwealth has a role to help support housing options for all Australians, but particularly for those fleeing domestic violence, as well as younger, low-income, older, and poorer Australians. The Help to Buy 2023 Bill is one of those measures, along with a whole range of things that we're doing after a decade of neglect.

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