Jodie Belyea (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. How is the Albanese Labor government helping more Australians into homes? What alternatives would leave Australians worse off?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thanks to the member for Dunkley for her question and also for being a champion for affordable housing in her community and right around Australia. This government is coming at the housing challenge from every responsible angle, and we've got a really ambitious gender: Build to Rent, Help to Buy, $32 billion of investment, working with the states and territories, training construction workers, and also some important steps which we have announced today.

I've asked the regulators and the banks to take a more reasonable approach to student debt and the financing of new apartment blocks, and the regulators have agreed to do that. For too long there's been an ambiguity here, and we are clearing that up. Student debt is different to other kinds of debt. It should be—and now it will be—treated differently. These are commonsense changes which will help build more homes and get more people into homes. The changes were agreed in the Universities Accord. They go hand in hand with our efforts to cut student debt and to take pressure off young people in other ways, including our cost-of-living help.

Mr Speaker, you would assume that a change this important and this simple would receive the overwhelming and enthusiastic support of the parliament, but apparently not. Even more surprising was the nature of the criticism in the press release we got from the shadow Treasurer. He said that the problem with this announcement was, 'This announcement provides no new money.' The very important reason it provides no new money is that it doesn't cost any money! The same bin fire of economic incoherence over there that says we are spending too much money on housing now says we are spending too little. What an absolute clown show it is over there.

The reason this is so surprising is, if you think about the $350 billion in cuts that they have in store for the Australian people that they won't tell them about, housing is included in that total—billions and billions of dollars that they would cut from housing. Housing is a big part of their secret costs and secret cuts, when as a country we need more homes, not fewer homes. They can't find the $350 billion they say they'll cut or the $600 billion they'll need for their nuclear fantasy without coming after housing. Their cuts to housing are another way they will make Australians worse off and take Australia backwards. They see investment in housing as wasteful spending, but we don't. We see it as a very important way to get more people into homes, to ease the cost of living and to build Australia's future.