Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. The Albanese Labor government will bring in over 1.8 million immigrants over five years, whilst Labor's housing crisis escalates. When will the Treasurer come clean on the real impact of Labor's big Australia plans?

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

First of all, on housing, we're very proud to have found room in a tight budget for $33 billion in investment in building more homes for more Australians to buy and to rent. We understand that there's a difference between this side of the house and that side of the House. They want to cut funding for housing, and we've found room to increase funding for housing, because, when we came to office, the construction pipeline was not what it needed to be, and we've been working as hard as we can and dedicating as many resources as we can to turning that around. And that's what we're doing. What the shadow Treasurer's question refuses to acknowledge is that net overseas migration is coming down quite substantially, and we saw that in the budget numbers that were released last night. There was a spike after COVID, and we have been responsibly managing down that net overseas migration, recognising that we needed to do that.

If those opposite have got a different view about migration, they should say so. But what happened was the opposition leader came in here and gave a budget reply speech and said he was going to do something, and, ever since then, he's pretended that never happened. And somebody should tell the Leader of the Opposition that they write this stuff down! And so let's hear what those opposite intend to do, because what happened was, after the Leader of the Opposition made this big pronouncement, the shadow Treasurer went to the Press Club, described not by me but by some of the friends upstairs as one of the worst performances they've ever seen at the Press Club—he couldn't explain the difference between the permanent intake and the net overseas migration intake. So they should come clean. What we're doing on this side of the House is responsibly managing migration down at the same time as we build more houses. If they've got an alternative view, then they should clear it up.