Kerry Rea (Bonner, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Housing and the Minister for the Status of Women. Will the minister inform the House of the progress made in the COAG Housing Working Group to address housing affordability and homelessness?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Bonner for her question. We know that housing affordability in Australia is at an all-time low. We had more figures yesterday from AMP.NATSEM showing that 62 per cent of first home buyers are now in housing stress, and at the other end we have got more older people also in housing stress. The number of older Australians in housing stress has doubled, according to this report.

A working group on housing was established by COAG in December 2007 to develop implementation plans for the housing affordability policies that Labor took to the last election—the Housing Affordability Fund, that $½ million fund to bring down the cost of building new homes; the National Rental Affordability Scheme, initially a program to support the building of 50,000—now 100,000—new affordable rental properties; our plan for 600 new homes for the homeless, A Place to Call Home, and the new and innovative approach of leaving people in place and moving services around them rather than forcing homeless families to move from pillar to post; our National Housing Supply Research Council to make sure that the dire straits we find ourselves now in when it comes to housing affordability do not recur in the future; and our proposal to release surplus Commonwealth land for housing and for other community uses. I am very pleased to chair the Housing Working Group established by COAG. It has representatives from state central agencies and, of course, from state housing departments, and I am very happy to be able to report that those implementation plans and policies are ready to roll.

Of course, that is not the end of the challenge. We do not imagine for a moment that the work on housing affordability is complete. After 12 years of substantial neglect in this area we have got a lot of problems to overcome. We know that demand began to outstrip supply seriously in 2004. We saw this semitrailer hurtling down the highway at us as a nation and the previous government never lifted a finger to address some of the issues that were contributing to the shortfall of housing that we now face. The reason housing, rental housing in particular, is so unaffordable is that we have a serious supply problem, a supply problem that we saw coming and that the previous government did nothing about.

The COAG implementation plans, when agreed, will see these policies, and also our first home saver accounts, ready to roll. They will be available in the second half of this year. Local government will be able to look to the Housing Affordability Fund for help to bring more affordable blocks of land onto the market and use the Housing Affordability Fund to support the rollout of e-processing—development application processing—to reduce the holding costs of land. The applications for the National Rental Affordability Scheme will open in June-July this year, and we will see the first 3½ thousand incentives available in the next financial year.

The building of new homes for the homeless will start within months. In 3½ months the government has agreed an agenda with the states and territories that the previous government was not able to come to in 12 years. In fact, a large part of the reason for that is that we had no real understanding or interest from the previous government when it came to housing affordability and, indeed, when it came to homelessness. This morning we heard the member for Warringah criticising Labor members of parliament for visiting homeless services. Why would you talk to Mission Australia about homelessness—or St Vincent de Paul or the Salvation Army or Wesley Mission! Why would you talk to any of these people about homelessness or, indeed, to any of the people living in those shelters who have the firsthand experience of becoming homeless and living as homeless people in our community! Why on earth would you talk to those people, Member for Warringah?

We have committed $150 million already to building new homes for the homeless. We have committed to extra support for organisations like RecLink, which engage homeless people with support services and are the originators of the Choir of Hard Knocks. Any of this could have been done in the 12 years of the previous government. There was no action. After 16 years of record growth we saw record numbers of homeless people and record numbers of homeless families with children. I am very pleased to be able to report to the House and to my Labor colleagues that our implementation plans, worked on by the COAG Working Group on Housing, are proceeding apace and that COAG has become a real vehicle for change, not an excuse for inaction.