Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'll take that interjection, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Minister for Housing from the government says 'supply'. She says, 'We are concentrating on supply.' I don't think I'm verballing the minister. She said that very clearly across the dispatch box. Well, let me give the minister a report card. Let me give the minister a sense of how well she and the government are doing. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has highlighted the weakest quarter of construction in more than a decade, with a meagre 23,000 dwellings commenced in the September 2023 quarter. The housing minister says, 'We're focused on supply.' What does the report card say? What does the scoreboard say? It hasn't been worse for over 10 years, Minister, so you are failing your own test.

That's why this is just going to get worse. The truth is—for those in the gallery and those watching—the reason it will get worse is that the government won't admit there's a problem. The government say, 'We're focused on supply; that is what we're focused on,' yet they are failing badly. As I said, we have seen renters have their rents increased by 26 per cent, with absolutely no plan from this government on how you get more homes into the market. We also saw, on the weekend, a very fair assessment, I think, from the Australian people. They said, 'We are bringing in record numbers of migrants—900,000 migrants compared to 265,000 homes. Where on earth are those people going to live?' We know that all this is doing is pushing down vacancy rates. We now have a national vacancy rate of one per cent. It's no wonder that in Melbourne, in my home state of Victoria, when you see an 'open for inspection' for a rental the queues sometimes go around the block. When you bring in 900,000 people with no idea of where they're going to live, guess who suffers? It's the Australians who live here. It's the Australians who live here who suffer.

I'm a very proud product of migration. I come from a migrant family. I'm a huge supporter of migration, but it must be planned. You must have a clue about where those people are going to live. We often talk about infrastructure and migration and the fact that the infrastructure in our cities has to keep up with the ever-growing number of migrants to this country. Well, there is no more important social infrastructure in this country than a roof over your head. There is no bridge, road, tunnel or drain that is more important than a roof over your head. So I would say to the Minister for Housing and the government: you can't abrogate your responsibility and say: 'Well, that's another minister's responsibility. The number of people coming in is not my responsibility as housing minister.'

In the September quarter of the year we had 548,800 migrants, and in that time we had 176,000 homes built. But there's a kicker in those statistics, an important kicker: of the 176,000 homes built, at least a third—potentially up to half—are actually just replacements of existing stock, so a portion of those 176,000 are not increasing the numbers. So those figures are even generous to the government.

See this speech in context