Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset, I acknowledge the remarkable valedictory speech that the House has heard from the member for Maribyrnong. On a personal note, it was a real honour to serve as a shadow minister when the member for Maribyrnong was the Leader of the Labor Party, and it is a great honour to serve alongside him as an assistant minister in the Albanese government.

It's pretty extraordinary to hear the words of the former housing minister and now shadow housing minister. It's no surprise that he has scurried out of the chamber, given his lacklustre record when it came to housing.

Under the former government, for most of their time in office, we didn't have a housing minister. Under the former government, homeownership rates in Australia fell to a 50-year low. Under the former government, building approvals were at an almost decadal low. Under the former government, there was a skills deficit through the entire construction industry. Under the former government, they went for their last five years failing to hold a meeting of state and territory housing ministers. Under the former government, social housing increased by less than 10,000 homes over nine years, compared to a 30,000-home increase under the Labor government that had preceded them.

It is certainly true that the Liberal Party once cared about housing. But that ended with the end of the Menzies era. The fact is the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments didn't give two hoots about housing policy. Instead, they pursued policies that actively made problems worse. We've just had the COVID-19 response inquiry report handed down, co-authored by Robyn Kruk, Catherine Bennett and Angela Jackson. This is what they had to say about the former government's HomeBuilder program, championed by the now shadow minister for housing:

There are clear indications that the infrastructure measures taken – in particular, HomeBuilder – overheated the industry and contributed to inflation in the post-pandemic era. The program was designed explicitly to stimulate aggregate demand and support the residential construction sector. It acted to stimulate consumption expenditure and lowered the significant household savings built up during the pandemic. However, the measure failed to appropriately take into account the supply-side effects of the pandemic.

It goes on to quote the HomeBuilder national partner agreement review: stakeholder consultation report:

It could be said that the HomeBuilder did partially contribute to the constraints in supply of labour, materials and land that resulted from this industry overheating.

The report goes on to say:

Recent media articles have also criticised the HomeBuilder program in particular for favouring middle- to high-income earners rather than lower income earners.

And it notes that it contributed to inflation costs. The program blew out to five times the expected budget.

Also under the former government, we had them go to their final election—which, fortunately nor the Australian people, they lost—with a policy that you should be able to raid your superannuation to pay for a home, a policy Malcolm Turnbull referred to as 'the craziest idea I have heard'. When the former government came to office, the average home cost around seven years earnings. By the time they left office, the average home cost around 11 years earnings. According to the data crunched in Battlers and Billionaires: The Updated Story of Inequality in Australia, throughout the period from 1880 to 2022, housings affordability was never as bad as when the former government left office. They left us with an unholy housing mess to clean up.

We have been focusing on doing that. We have set an ambitious target of 1.2 million homes over five years, aiming to galvanise efforts across all levels of government and industry. We are working with states and territories to unlock land, improve zoning and build the infrastructure we need to support new homes. We're training the tradies we need through fee-free TAFE and bringing in more tradies from overseas. We're directly investing in more housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund, which in just its first round is directly helping more social housing than the previous government did in nine years. Relevant to my competition portfolio, we are working with states and territories through national competition policy to explore opportunities to remove barriers to the uptake of modern construction methods. Right now the planning system in industry is geared towards traditional on-site construction methods. National competition policy will look at ways to level the regulatory playing field, delivering significant cost savings and reducing construction times. It's also good for our net zero transition, with less waste generated from an uptake in off-site construction.

Under Labor we're helping renters doing it tough. We've had back-to-back increases in Commonwealth rent assistance, boosting Commonwealth rent assistance by 40 per cent, helping around a million Australians.

More affordable homes are absolutely critical to tackling inequality in Australia, and since Labor came to office nearly 4,000 homes have been built, boosted by Labor's policies like fee-free TAFE and by training the workers we need to build homes. That includes more than 10,000 homes built through Labor's housing programs like the Social Housing Accelerator program and new builds under Labor's expanded Home Guarantee Scheme. We've got more than 20,000 homes in the pipeline through direct Commonwealth investment, including the 13,700 under round 1 of the Housing Australia Future Fund.

Right now, we have the unholy coalition of the Liberals and Nationals and the Greens blocking two significant housing measures. The 'build to rent' and Help to Buy bills are being stalled by the Liberals and the Nationals, who don't want to see more young Australians able to buy a home, and by the Greens, who are the housing supply denialists of Australia. Their spokesman has said that Australia has enough homes, against evidence from every serious think-tank in Australia and the fact that Australia has fewer homes per person than the average advanced country.

The Greens policy on housing is to support rent caps. As the Economist magazine recently noted of a similar policy pursued by the Scottish National Party and its then ally the Green Party, they temporarily capped rent increases at three per cent a year. A new housing bill allows ministers to control rents for longer. As a result, as the Economist magazine noted, in a panic some developers cancelled build-to-rent projects. Others switched from rental flats to student rooms, which are not covered by the bill. The fact is that housing markets have a supply side too, and, when you put into place rental caps of the kind that the Greens would suggest you're simply going to cause a housing supply shortage. I point to the ACT—a jurisdiction which doesn't have an absolute rental price cap. The ACT has limits on the extent to which any one landlord can raise rents above the ACT average.

You have, from the coalition, a claim that labour costs are driving up the challenge of housing affordability. Treasury analysis shows very clearly that labour costs in the most recent year were 18.7 per cent of total costs, compared to 19.6 per cent of total costs before that. In building construction, labour costs are significantly less than the average for the construction sector as a whole. Labour costs in construction have been growing more slowly than other costs. So attempts to blame workers in the housing industry for housing supply challenges are simply off base. We need assistance from this parliament to put in place those build-to-rent and help-to-buy measures so we can do more, but even without that support we're strengthening renters' rights.

The housing minister is meeting with state and territory counterparts. We're building more affordable rental homes and we're taking action after a decade of inaction from the former Liberal-National government. While they had programs like HomeBuilder which made the inflation challenge worse for Australia, we're putting in place programs to boost housing supply in this country. Labor understands that housing supply is at the core of dealing with inequality and opportunity in this country. We're getting on with the job. We're building. We need the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens to stop blocking and let us start building.

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