Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canberra for that question. The member for Canberra knows that Australia doesn't have enough homes and we haven't had enough homes for a long time. That's why our budget, of course, has over $6 billion in new investments to help build new homes for Australia. This brings Labor's new housing initiative investments to $32 billion since we came to office. That is $32 billion to build more homes, more quickly, in more places, right across Australia. This is what our Homes for Australia Plan is all about.

Homes for Australia will help us meet our ambitious national target of building 1.2 million homes over the five years from 1 July. It includes $9.3 billion of funding for a new housing agreement—a five-year agreement with the states and territories. It also includes a billion dollars in new investments for necessary infrastructure, and another $1 billion to support transitional and crisis accommodation for women and children fleeing family and domestic violence. And for young people, we are helping nearly a million Australian households with $1.9 billion for the first back-to-back increase in the Commonwealth rent assistance in more than 30 years to help renters. We're working right across government to meet the housing challenges that we inherited from those opposite.

In schools, we've committed more than $90 million in the budget to boost the number of tradies. We need more tradies to build more homes. In industry, we are investigating alternative methods of construction because we know we need everybody in government with their shoulder to the wheel to meet our ambitious national target of 1.2 million homes. An important part of that is social and affordable homes—

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