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

Thank you so much, Deputy Speaker. So it is a real shame that we see a government that's got a plan here and those opposite, after their decade of complete inaction on this problem, will not let us make progress on some key parts of it.

Unfortunately, we do see a pretty similar attitude from the Greens, who are important for us trying to get our housing agenda through the Senate. We're seeing it on the Help to Buy legislation, which is before the parliament at the moment. I'll be reintroducing that bill into the House very shortly, and I'm really hopeful that the Greens are able to take a beat and do the right thing and support the people that they say they care about. The Help to Buy legislation will come before the parliament again. It is about making sure that 40,000 childcare workers and aged care workers and early years teachers have the opportunity to own their own home. It's based on a pretty simple belief that ordinary people in our country should have the ability to access home ownership. Here we have the chance for the parliament to support 40,000 of those people into home ownership. Instead of allowing us to make progress on this matter, the Greens political party continue to play politics.

I've spent a little bit of time in the last couple of weeks visiting states where shared-equity schemes—as the Help to Buy legislation is—are on foot at the moment and speaking to young people who have been able to use those schemes to get into home ownership. I met a wonderful young man, Yianni, last week in Adelaide. He's 26 years old. He's a physio at the local Defence base. He literally gets out of bed every morning and goes to a Defence base and assists veterans in trying to regain mobility after they've had injuries. He's spent his whole life so far living with his parents, and he talked to me about this opportunity of getting a shared-equity scheme—of starting out thinking that he had no chance of getting home ownership, then learning about a shared-equity scheme, putting aside that little bit of money that he could and then the incredible feeling that he had of actually getting that chance to own his first home. He said to me, ‘Any kind of scheme that helps people get into the housing market in this way is amazing,’ and he just talked to me about the experience he has now of having his own space. For him, it was about the experience of becoming an adult and having housing as a part of that.

I also met with Emma in Melbourne last week, who is a researcher and who was able to buy her first property thanks to the Victorian shared-equity scheme. She talked to me about the experience she had, quite similarly to Yianni, where she had basically given up on home ownership—this amazing young person in Melbourne. She just talked to me about the genuine elation she felt and how she walked around the house after she got home ownership for the first time and thought to herself, ‘I can't believe this is mine and that I don't have to ask permission to paint the walls, that I don't have to worry about hanging a picture and that my dog can have a place they get to know where they can feel safe and comfortable.’ These are the things that home ownership means, and we can make 40,000 Emmas and Yiannis if we work together as a parliament to address this critical issue.

Help to Buy is, of course, only one part of the government's agenda. We are working very hard with the states to build more homes in our country. We are working with the states to improve renters’ rights, and we've helped 120,000 people into home ownership through the home guarantee scheme so far. We've got a rich and broad housing agenda, and it's been a real pleasure to speak to the parliament about some of those initiatives.

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