Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for her question because the question of increasing the housing stock that is available for public housing tenants and for low-income households is an important issue. That is why this government made sure that we had a minister for housing, so we had the focus on it at a federal level that had been lacking throughout the Howard years. As part of that, a range of new housing schemes were introduced to try and increase the stock of housing—making it available to more people—and to encourage state governments and other providers to work towards the provision of more homes.

We have committed, under the National Rental Affordability Scheme, to provide 50,000 new more affordable rental homes through NRAS by 30 June 2016, which is 50,000 more new affordable rental homes than would have been delivered if the Liberal government had still been in office. We also remain committed to meeting our interim target of delivering 35,000 of these new more affordable rental homes by 30 June 2014. We continue to work very closely with state and territory governments and NRAS participants to improve the pace of delivery to ensure that more affordable rental housing is brought to market as questioned.

I note that in my own portfolio area there has been a number of developments in providing affordable housing for university students in partnerships with the universities. They are proving to be very popular under the general housing initiatives. I do acknowledge that NRAS was slower to start than we thought and that investors needed to be— (Time expired)