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

I'm absolutely happy to do that. I would encourage those opposite, if they don't want to be called that, to stop teaming up with people of the crossbench to stand in the path of critical things that will help us address the housing issues in the minds of Australians. In some senses, I expect this ridiculous bloody-mindedness on this policy that we see from those opposite, because it was a decade of inaction of the part of their party which has in part brought us to where we are today on housing. But I do expect better of the Australian Greens party. The hypocrisy from the Greens is so outrageous that they actually bought a shared equity scheme, a similar policy, to the election in 2022. They are coming into the parliament and voting against their own policy, and they're holding to ransom the housing aspirations of 40,000 people who need and deserve the help of government.

Our party takes a very different view. Those 40,000 people—the childcare workers, the early career nurses, the aged care workers—are the reason that my colleagues and I get out of bed every morning. Those people are the reason that the member for Fraser and I decided to go into politics. I remind the parliament that this is not some abstract political debate here. The things we do in this chamber have real consequences for real people. Forty-thousand people can have their lives changed by this law, but those opposite and those on the crossbench stand in the path of progress. I would say about the Greens that they're good at making a very big noise about their concerns about housing progress, but, when it comes time to make a difference, they will choose politics every single time, and they deserve every day to be condemned for that stance.

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