Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Gilmore for her question. Of course, our No. 1 priority every day is relieving cost-of-living pressures. There are three key ways that we're doing that. We're getting wages up, which is opposed by those opposite, we're bringing costs down through our cost-of-living measures and we're getting inflation back to where it should be. We inherited inflation on the rise, with a six in front of it, and now it's going down, with a two in front of it. That is important. We know that housing is one of the big costs causing stress for Australians. Labor's Help to Buy program will help 40,000 Australians buy a home of their own—people who have worked hard and saved but still can't get a deposit. We're stepping up to help more Australians buy a home. We want to help with social housing through our Social Housing Accelerator and the Housing Australia Future Fund. We want to help renters through the increases that we've had in rental assistance. But we also want to help more people to buy their own home. Those opposite right across the board, both there and some down in the corner there are teaming up—the Liberals and the Greens—to get in the way. The clue as to why they oppose is in the title, 'Help to Buy'. It's because the Liberals never want to help and the Greens never want to buy. Australia's housing shortage didn't happen overnight. It took a decade of a coalition government that, for most of the time they were in office, didn't even bother to have a housing minister. But now they're still standing in the way, blocking help, playing politics instead of making progress and, in this case in the Senate, teaming up with the Greens political party. There will be a vote tomorrow in the Senate on the Help to Buy scheme, and that will be a test of whether the Greens political party will vote for something that's their policy and that they took to the election—a shared equity scheme. You can't actually build if you're just focused on protests and not focusing on progress. That is what we are doing. They see issues to campaign on; we see challenges to act on. Blocking bills in the Senate and blocking housing in your respective electorates helps no-one, so we think that this legislation should be carried. We're not waiting around for the Liberals and Greens, but it's a big test tomorrow in the other place to see whether the coalition continue to combine with the Greens to become the 'no-alition' in opposing good policy.

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