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

It is a real pleasure to be able to make a contribution to a debate as important as this, because housing is an issue which is affecting the lives of millions of people around our country. What I wish and what I think most Australians wish is that we could come into the chamber from different sides of politics as colleagues and respect each other and have a real debate about the issues here. What I find so regrettable about the issues that the member for Deakin engages with is the sense of nastiness and personalness about every possible policy area he debates. I am not going to fire back at that because I don't want to get down in the gutter because that kind of politics is not taking us anywhere. It is not taking us anywhere on housing. It is not taking us anywhere on the cost of living. Attacking each other personally is not taking the country forward, and so I am not going to engage in it. I'm actually going to take the chance to do something quite radical and talk about housing policy, a very important issue that affects my constituents and the constituents of all of us here in this chamber. If we play politics as usual, where we just beat each other up and try to tear each other's ideas down, we're not going to make a difference to the lives of the people who elected us to this parliament, and I'm just not willing to engage in that.

Let me talk to you a little bit about the things that our government is doing. I spoke in question time about the very regrettable fact that we arrived in office to find the cupboard bare on housing policy. That is just a fact. I also spoke to the parliament about the fact that, in the decade before we came to office, for most of that decade there was no Commonwealth housing minister. I'm not making it up. The Commonwealth made a deliberate decision to withdraw itself from this area that is so important to the lives of our constituents. That is why, when we arrived in office, we didn't have a set of policy solutions ready to go that would help us make a difference to this problem. So what have we done? We've rolled up our sleeves, like you would expect a big-thinking Labor government to do, and we set out to make a difference to this. That's where our $32 billion Homes for Australia plan is taking us.

This is important to us for many different reasons. It's important to us because we speak to people in our electorates who are profoundly affected by this problem. We talk to young people who describe the sense of despair in the pit of their stomach when they get yet another rejection for a rental application. It might be their 10th or 11th. They are living a life where a lot of young people around this country don't know when they will have secure, affordable housing over their heads. That does not reflect well on the work that's been done in this parliament. We talk to people who have got kids who are having to move their children from one school to another because they're being moved on from a rental property. Families like this, middle-income families with children, a generation ago in our country in all likelihood would have had the opportunity to buy their own home. Today, they are being denied that opportunity, and this is affecting their lives in very profound ways.

I'm very lucky to be a homeowner. I've got three kids. I never want to face a situation where I can't say to my kids, 'We're going to get to stay in this house, and you're not going to have to move schools and find a new GP,' and all of the other things that come with that sense of uncertainty of having to shift location, but a lot of people around our country are facing that, and that's why this is so much core business for us.

The $32 billion Homes for Australia package is about building more homes. We're trying to build 1.2 million homes, working with the states, and I want to say a little bit about this target. The shadow minister who spoke earlier derided this target, and he talked about quotes from the Property Council and the BCA and the Master Builders Association. What he neglected to say is that these three groups—who, let's be frank, are not always great friends of the Labor Party—are fiercely in favour of the target. What they are saying to this parliament is that nothing is going to be achieved if we don't aspire to achieve something. And yet what we hear from those opposite is that not only will they walk back the Commonwealth from housing just like they did when they were last in government, but they have said they're not going to have a housing target at all. What they're saying is, 'Lower the ambition, lower the strive, lower the drive, and let's see where we get to.' No. The Master Builders Association and the Property Council and the BCA are all saying that the 1.2 million homes is an important and big thing for us to do because it is galvanising action from the states and the Commonwealth to try to help us build more homes. It is bold and ambitious, because boldness and ambition are exactly what we need if we want to make a difference to this problem for the lives of our constituents.

How are we getting there? We're working with the states and territories to do the gritty work of unlocking land, improving zoning and building the infrastructure we need to support more homes. We are training more tradies, something we now find the opposition is stridently opposed to for reasons that I cannot possibly imagine. Of course, we are building more social and affordable housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund. This is a $10 billion investment in social and affordable housing. We announced the first round of HAFF funding, 13,700 social and affordable homes. That will be more social and affordable homes than the coalition built in their entire almost decade in office. That's what aspiration and boldness and ambition get you—it gets you results.

We're also looking after renters, because we absolutely recognise that building more homes takes time, and our constituents can't wait for too long before getting that assistance. We are using that national cabinet process to make sure that we work with the states to improve renters' rights. We are helping renters pay the rent. We have delivered the biggest increase to Commonwealth rent assistance in more than 30 years and we are providing more Australians with assistance to own their own homes through an expanded Home Guarantee Scheme.

Speaker, I want to speak to you about some of the facts because we heard—frankly—blatant lies be told by the shadow minister when he raised some matters before. I talked about $32 billion for our ambitious housing agenda; those opposite have said they will cut $19 billion of that spending. I mean, what sort of person would cut housing funding in the middle of an acute housing crisis? We have helped 128,000 individuals with lower mortgage deposits. In our 2½ years in office, that is twice as many people as were assisted than in the decade the coalition were in office. We have invested in 55,000 social and affordable homes—again, more than the entirety of the coalition government combined. We have helped 35,000 tradies with fee-free TAFE; they have called fee-free TAFE 'wasteful spending'. We have granted more than 10,000 visas to construction workers, more than any other year those opposite were in office. We are trying to legislate to build 100,000 rental homes through a build-to-rent scheme and helped 40,000 Australians get into home ownership. The barrier to those things happening is those opposite, who stand in the path of almost everything our government tries to do about housing. We have helped more than a million households, who have received 45 per cent more Commonwealth rent assistance because of the work of our government; they never increased Commonwealth rent assistance above CPI not one year that they were in office. We have a housing minister—what a revelation; for most of the time they were in office, they didn't have one. We have convened nine ministerial councils with state and territory housing ministers; they didn't meet with state housing ministers in the last five years they were in office. Can you believe that? When the states control so much about this problem, they could not even be bothered organising a meeting so they could sit down and talk about it. Alan Kohler has said that Labor's Housing Australia Future Fund is 'one of the best policies he has ever seen'. Saul Eslake says the coalition's super for housing policy would be 'one of the worst policy decisions of the 21st century'—wow!

Labor is taking a very different approach for this issue. We recognise this issue is absolutely critical to the lives of our constituents. In the time we have been in office, we have pushed through a lot of really important things on housing. We have pushed through a lot of really important things on the cost of living. But as we come into the election straight, I really want Australians to see that they have a really clear choice between two approaches. We have a party that sits opposite me that has opposed virtually everything that we have tried to do to relieve pressure on Australians. Almost all the time, we have been able to battle through and deliver that support to the people we were elected to represent against their opposition, and the same goes for housing. I want Australians to understand what is at risk here. We have a reckless, aggressive opposition that knows one word—no—that says no to everything that matters to our constituents and certainly no to everything that matters on housing. These things that we have built up as a government, these big bold ideas about how we're going to help Australians with what is, for many people, the most important problem in their lives, will go away if you elect Peter Dutton as your prime minister.

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