Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you thought Labor's housing crisis was bad in 2023, it's getting worse in 2024 and it will get worse in the years to come. Under the Labor government—20 months later—we have fewer homes being built than we've seen for over a decade. We have fewer first home buyers than since the Gillard government. We have fewer approvals than we've seen for over a decade, and the answer from this government is a scheme to replicate shared equity—Help to Buy—when every single state, bar one, around this country already has a shared equity scheme. These schemes are so unloved that, in New South Wales, for example, 94 per cent of shared-equity places remain available, because nobody wants them. In the midst of a housing crisis created by Labor and their migration program, the answer is to create more shared-equity places out of this parliament for a product that Australians have already shown that they do not want. Only six per cent of the places in the New South Wales scheme were taken, so the geniuses in the government here decided to create another 10,000 places per year. These are places that, quite frankly, Australians do not want. Australians want to own their own home, they want support from this government and they don't want to be crowded out by half a million new migrants with no plan on housing them.