Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the matter of public importance. I really genuinely thank the member for Kooyong for bringing this debate forward. I've been in my job for just a couple of days beyond two weeks now, and one of the things I would say is that the intense politicisation of what is going on in housing policy at the moment I don't think is actually helping us move towards the right solution for the country. There are people who are sitting today on the crossbench who are part of the solution, not part of the problem, such as the member for Kooyong and the member for Wentworth, who is also here. These are smart women who are deeply engaged in the policy detail and really thinking about the ways in which our government can work with states and territories and others who are part of this space to get better solutions for Australians. I want to commend them for their engagement on this.

Since I was appointed to this new role as Minister for Housing and Minister for Homelessness, I have, as you would expect, spent a lot of time talking to people around the country who are really seriously affected by Australia's housing crisis. I have talked to a lot of renters, a group I am very, very concerned about right now, people who are in real distress and who are seeing rents rising too frequently and too fast. I've seen and talked to people who are trying to get into housing. They've told me their stories of standing in queues to look at rentals which have had literally 100 people in them. I've talked to renters who are being treated really badly by their landlords, who are living in homes where there's black mould that will not be removed and where the basic functionality of the home is not being looked after. I know that, for renters, that is combined with this incredibly deep sense of injustice that they are every day, they feel, moving further away from that dream of homeownership.

I've talked to young people who I am also really worried about. We have had a promise in our country for a long time that generations of Australians can have a reasonable expectation of homeownership. I know this generation of young people feel that that is slipping beyond their grasp.

What we see is that the net effect of all that's going on in housing at the moment is flowing directly through to the homelessness sector. I was very pleased and honoured to open National Homelessness Week. A couple of weeks ago I talked to activists all over the sector. I also talked to some people who are long-term homeless. There are absolutely gut-wrenching stories about things that have seen people pushed into homelessness. I've also spoken to people who have been able to come out of it and people who have talked to me about the fact that, after a lifetime of abuse and neglect has occurred for them, secure and affordable housing has been a pathway towards them being able to address those problems and rebuild their lives.

Suffice it to say I have enormous passion for the project that is in front of me. Housing is not about nuts and bolts. It's not just about bricks and mortar. This is the foundation on which every person living in our country builds their life and experiences the citizenship that we offer here, and so nothing could be more important right now than trying to address the concerns of millions of people around our country for whom housing is a life-defining issue.

This housing crisis has been a generation in the making. There are complex causes of the problem, but if I could distil it down to one thing it would be the failure of governments at varying levels over a whole set of decades to properly invest in, think about and develop policies to make sure that we have enough homes in our country. The member for Kooyong spoke a little bit about this in her address. The bottom line and fundamental problem and the issues that people are seeing in the housing market at the moment all come back to the fact that we have not been building enough homes, and we are still not building enough homes fast enough.

That is why our government is stepping into this space. We came into government two years ago after a decade of complete and abject neglect in this policy area. I want to share two facts about that neglect. The first is that we came out of a period of nine years of coalition government and, for the last five years of that government, housing ministers around this country did not meet once. This has got to be a collaboration between the states and the Commonwealth and, indeed, local government. The housing ministers did not meet once. I can tell you something too: we have launched a $32 billion homes for Australians plan and we spent more, invested more, in housing in just our last federal budget than the coalition did in their entire nine years combined. That's how seriously they took this issue.

We are a nation today led by a person whose access to safe, secure and affordable housing in his childhood transformed the entire trajectory of his life. We have a housing crisis in this country and a Prime Minister who grew up in public housing, so it's not surprising that we have a bold and ambitious agenda to try to address the problem that's in front of us. Our government has worked with the states and territories to build a target for housing across the country. We have an ambitious, bold goal of building 1.2 million homes in our country in the coming five years. It is bold and ambitious, and it is bold and ambitious because not being bold and ambitious is not going to help us fix this problem. It is exactly what we need to do.

This means that the Commonwealth has got to get in and get more active in housing policy. You've seen that in the national leadership that we've provided, in funding and incentives that have been provided to state governments to get homes built more quickly. You've seen it in the tremendous work that has been done around skills and in training more tradies, funding more apprenticeships and growing that workforce. There were 20,000 fee-free TAFE places in the last budget alone to improve the number of construction workers in our country. Of course, there's that really important investment in social housing that our government has made, delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to help reduce homelessness. The $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund is critical to this.

The fruits of all this effort are starting to come forward in the community. Actually, this morning I had this incredible experience of going out with the ACT housing minister, Yvette Berry, and looking at three new public housing units that the ACT government is just about to move new tenants in to. What the government has done here is take what was an enormous block of land here in Canberra and build three brand-new units. These are units that are designed for proper access for people with disability, and they are designed for people, women in particular, who are fleeing from violence with their children. This is really important work that's happening, and it's a real pleasure to be part of it.

We have this big goal of building 1.2 million homes over a five-year period, but I really want Australians to hear that we understand that you are in pain right now and of course that's not all we're doing. Of course we have a suite of policies aimed at trying to help people get the relief that they need while they wait for more homes to come online.

So a few really important things have happened here. The member for Kooyong talked about the increases to Commonwealth rent assistance. We have just executed two back-to-back increases to Commonwealth rent assistance. That's the first time that has happened in 30 years. There are more than a million households around the country who now have more than $1,000 a year extra in their pockets since we came to government, through those increases to rent assistance. We're working through National Cabinet to improve the rental experience too, and there are some really important commitments that the states have signed up to as part of the National Housing Accord to make sure that, for people who are in rentals, they're being treated appropriately.

I also want to call out the work that is being done on the Home Guarantee Scheme. We have helped 110,000 Australians get into homeownership through the Home Guarantee Scheme. That's twice the number that were supported under the previous government. I've talked a little bit about the government's agenda and things that have already been agreed to and funded. I want to be really clear here: I recognise that there is more that needs to be done. No-one is pretending that the crisis is fixed and no-one is pretending that the crisis is over, but what I hope people hear from me is that we have a really good offering here—$32 billion that will be invested in housing. I as minister am dedicated to providing the drive and energy we need to actually see that money hit the ground and make sure that people feel the effects.

I do want to mention that we have two really important pieces of policy that are stuck in the Senate at the moment that the Greens and the Liberals are refusing to move forward. They have built this incredibly hyperpoliticised and very unfortunate alliance, which has blocked just about everything that we have tried to do to support the housing needs of Australians. It's really disappointing. There are two important initiatives here. One is called a help to buy scheme. This is something that would be critical in helping Australians who are on the lower end of the income spectrum to access the housing market when they otherwise wouldn't be able to do that. The other is creating a better build-to-rent market here in Australia, something the member for Kooyong also talked about.

I would say that we've got a really significant problem on our hands here as a country. We're not going to fix this by doing politics as usual. I call on all parties in the government to emulate the best practice of the member for Kooyong, bring these discussions forward and work together to try to make a fix for this.

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