Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I remember buying my first home of my own. It was here in Canberra, in the 1980s. It was a little one-bedroom 1960s bed brick unit, and it was mine. I could play my choice of music. I didn't have to accommodate flatmates. Up until then I'd shared houses. I could paint it if I wanted to. I could change the blinds. There was just that sense of being able to control the space that you're in. It was tiny. It was a foot in the door. But when I sold it a few years later it didn't buy me a house or even a flat; it bought me a block of land, and I then got another mortgage and built a house in the Blue Mountains, which is the block that I'm on to this day. That's a lot of years ago.

I remember, on both those occasions, the sense of security it gave me—a sense of place, of having somewhere that was mine, no matter what else was happening, including in the press gallery in Old Parliament House. No matter what was happening, I had a place to retreat to. And I want more people to feel that, to have that sense of their own place, because I think secure housing—knowing the place you're going to sleep in not just tonight but every night for as long as you choose for that to be your home—all comes down to your control over that space. I think having that sense of security also allows you to focus on education or career, your physical or mental health, your family. That is really special, but it is out of reach for way too many people right now.

Previous speakers have talked about their fears for their children. I'm the bottom of the baby boomers, and my friends and I fear for our own children and our grandchildren. We fear for nieces and nephews and their friends, who don't have the same belief about a home, because of the neglect that this sector has faced for so many years. They don't have that sense of trust that this will one day be theirs. We have to change that, and we're very focused on changing it, and the only way we're going to change it is with more supply. For a start, we need supply that gives people a place to rent while they're saving to buy their own home. But, more than anything, we need new places to expand the options for people. Without supply we're just going to get stuck in this rut with prices of existing properties spiralling. It's really clear to us that that has to be the focus, not tax changes that are not even our policy, which is what the opposition wants to talk about—the place where there has been a vacuum of housing policy the entire time I've been in this parliament. For more than eight years there has been nothing from those opposite to provide any tangible improvement in housing supply. But that's what we are focused on.

The cost of housing is one of the biggest hip-pocket hits that people are feeling right now, whether it's through their mortgage or through their rent. I want to put something on the record. There's a lot of talk about who did it tougher. Was it the people back in the nineties paying 17 per cent interest rates? I was one of those. But there's no doubt in my mind that young people now are facing a much tougher barrier to entry into housing. We were paying maybe 17 or 17½ per cent. It was off a lower base. Yes, our incomes were lower, but our cost of living was also lower because we just didn't have the essentials that you have to have today. That is why housing speaks to the true cost-of-living crisis that people are facing.

We're helping in three ways. One is that our housing policy and our cost-of-living policy are all about helping to reduce the costs and helping to stop the increase from continuing on the terrible trajectory that it is on. That's the second challenge: fighting inflation. It is half what it was when we came to government. These are the challenges. And the third one is supply.

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