Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

I asked the government yesterday how many homes their Housing Australia Future Fund was going to build in Tasmania. They did not say. I asked for a number: I didn't get one. This government talks up their housing fund like it's going to solve all the country's housing problems, but as soon as I ask what it's going to do for the people who I represent then there's radio silence. They say to me, 'We can't guarantee you'll get any homes in Tasmania because we don't want to compromise the fund's independence.' So how did they guarantee 10,000 homes for frontline workers? Who decided that? Not the fund, not the board and not the minister. The Labor Party decided that's how many homes would be built for frontline workers. So the Labor Party doesn't care about the independence of the fund when it comes to investing in remote Indigenous communities, domestic violence shelters, housing for veterans, housing for older women and housing for frontline workers. Only when it comes to delivering for Tasmania do they say, 'Oh, no, we couldn't possibly do that.'

It's not that they can't, it's because they don't want to. That's what is lacking: not the ability, but the will. It's a lack of will to do anything about Tasmania's housing crisis which has led us to where we are today. And it's this government's lack of will to do anything that will mean that we're stuck there, with nothing getting better and everything getting worse. If we just get our population share of the fund we will get 600 homes. That is flat-out unacceptable, because we're not just a state with two per cent of the country's population; we're the state where homelessness is growing by more than 10 times the national average, and we're the state that's on track over the next five years to have another 1,110 people without a home. Anything less than a guarantee of 1,200 homes is a guarantee we're going to drown. I will not vote for anything that condemns us to simply drown more slowly.