Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A few sporting analogies have been bandied about during this session, so I'm going to add one of my own here. It's probably not one that the Prime Minister would like, but on the point of housing affordability I am going to say that the coalition are the Rabbitohs when it comes to housing policy, because they are dead last; they are the wooden spoons. If we look at what is happening on housing, they vacated the field entirely.

Housing affordability is a concern for families right across my electorate. There is a higher proportion of renters and mortgage holders in the electorate of Reid than in any other part of the country, so any increases in rent or interest rates have a disproportionate impact on my community. Sydney has been ranked as the world's second-least affordable market after Hong Kong, with an average home costing more than 13 times the median salary. But it hasn't always been this way. When my parents came to this country more than four decades ago, they worked hard and were able to buy a home within five years of arriving in this country. Our family's success was possible because of the stability given to them by affordable housing. That stability is now out of reach for many families in Sydney. So how did we get here? A problem as big as this did not happen overnight. It has been brewing for years and years and years. We are here because of a decade of complete and utter failure by the Rabbitohs of housing policy—the former coalition government at federal and state levels. Under their watch there was no investment in housing and no policies to increase housing supply, so we are now left with a critical housing shortage.

We all have a responsibility to do what we can to build more homes. That is exactly what our focus has been for the last three budgets. We are laser focused on increasing housing supply. In our first budget, the Treasurer announced an ambitious goal of building more than a million homes, including $350 million for the federal government and for the states and territories to build 10,000 new homes each year. In our second budget, we made changes to encourage more investment in build-to-rent developments, boosted homelessness funding and made it easier to buy a home, by expanding the eligibility of the Home Guarantee Scheme.

In this recent budget, we announced $6.2 billion in new investment to build more homes and support Australians. In this budget alone there has been more investment in housing than in all nine of the coalition budgets combined. Over the three Albanese Labor government budgets, we have invested a total of $32 billion in new housing initiatives. That is a record investment. This is what a government does when it wants to tackle housing affordability head on. When it comes to housing, the contrast between this side of the House and those opposite could not be more stark. We have ambitious plans, record investment and big targets to build more homes, whereas those on the opposite side have a lightweight policy that involves getting young people to raid their superannuation. It's a policy that has been collectively panned by housing experts and economists alike.

We are getting on with the job of bringing homeownership back into reach for millions of Australians. We've helped more than 110,000 Australians into homeownership through the Home Guarantee Scheme, and through the Housing Australia Future Fund we are making the biggest investment in social and affordable housing in more than a decade. We are working with state governments and committing $1 billion in this budget to get the necessary infrastructure to make communities work—roads, parks and community facilities.

In Australia, we love big infrastructure projects: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the opera house and the Snowy Hydro scheme. We are obsessed with major infrastructure projects. I think that housing is the next major infrastructure project that we as a government are going to build in this country. That is something that we can be proud of, because we are unashamedly ambitious with our housing policy, unlike those opposite.

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