Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) safe and affordable housing is central to the security and dignity of Australians;

(b) Australia does not have enough homes and has not for a long time; and

(c) the Government has committed to an ambitious housing reform agenda which will boost the supply of all housing, including more public and social housing, more affordable housing, more homes to rent, and more homes to buy;

(2) acknowledges the $6.2 billion in new investment in the 2024-25 budget to build more homes more quickly, bringing the Government's new housing initiatives to $32 billion, which includes:

(a) additional funding for the new $9.3 billion National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness (including a doubling of Commonwealth homelessness funding to $400 million every year, matched by states and territories);

(b) directing $1 billion to Housing Australia towards crisis and transitional accommodation for women and children experiencing domestic violence;

(c) assisting nearly one million Australian households with the cost of rent by delivering $1.9 billion for the first back-to-back increase to Commonwealth Rent Assistance in more than 30 years; and

(d) providing up to $1.9 billion in concessional finance for community housing providers and other charities to support delivery of the 40,000 social and affordable homes under the Housing Australia Future Fund and National Housing Accord; and

(3) further acknowledges the Government's ambitious goal of building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade.

There probably isn't a greater challenge that governments right across the country face than making sure that there are enough homes being built for the Australian people. Right across the country, there is a reduction in the number of homes that are in the pipeline for approvals for planning and construction. This is seeing huge pressures placed on the spectrum across the housing sector—and it is a spectrum. If you don't have enough homes to make homes affordable for those who want to buy a home, it's going to push more people into the rental market. More people going into the rental market without more homes being built pushes up the price of rent. That's what we've seen in my electorate over the last few years, post COVID and post the return to the usual levels of migration and population growth: we've seen huge pressures in the rental market. That has also seen, across parts of Melbourne, rent rises of 20 per cent, 30 per cent and 40 per cent. It has put huge pressure on people being able to afford their rent. It has stabilised a little bit, but people are still facing rent increases, and that is something that we are very conscious of.

Those things also push more people outside of the private rental market and into the social and affordable housing market. That means that we need to keep up with the growing list of people who need to access social and affordable homes, including people who are fleeing their homes due to domestic violence. There are young people whose home is not safe to be in. Recently, also, we had an event where we had the Housing for the Aged Action Group here in parliament and we heard from people who had experienced homelessness—especially two really inspiring women, who talked about their experiences; there was an older woman who'd faced homelessness. It was a reminder that we must do more in this place.

But there is a bit of a perfect storm at the moment, where you have the high price of producing a home; where the timeline for approvals, especially in different states and territories, can be very, very long; and where the incentives for developers to build enough homes for the private sector are really pushing against the industry. What that means right now is that we have huge targets, but there are a lot of challenges that we need to overcome in order to meet them. And this is an extremely important job.

I am heartened, though, that this Albanese Labor government understands that the federal government cannot wash away its responsibilities in the housing sector. But we have to be at the table. We have to be at the table, working with state and territory governments to ensure that we are not only investing in social housing but also working with those governments to try and increase the number of homes in the pipeline, through our housing accord—through the plan to build 1.2 million homes over the next five years.

There are going to be people who will use every single opportunity to oppose housing in their local community—people who are going to be stamping up and down, saying, 'We don't want any development; we don't want any new homes.' But what is that saying to the kids, the young people, and other people trying to get into the housing market? If, every time, you have a member of the Liberal Party or of the Greens opposed—and the Greens are famously against any sort of development—what does that say to young people who can't afford a home, who can't afford to get into the housing market? Every time we have people saying no to any form of new housing in our communities, those pressures inside the housing sector are going to get bigger.

We have invested huge amounts of money in incentivising the states and territories to move housing through the development pipeline more quickly. We've also invested huge amounts of money in social and affordable homes. There's the Housing Australia Future Fund, which those opposite, obviously, didn't support; they didn't support the construction of 30,000 social and affordable homes, and they didn't support the construction of 4,000 places that were going directly to women and children fleeing domestic violence, which is part of what the Housing Australia Future Fund does.

We need to build more homes. We need to work across governments. We need to pull every single lever that we can pull. So this is a huge challenge. We need to build 1.2 million homes over the next five years, and we need to work across governments in order to ensure that more Australians have a safe and secure house to live in.

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