Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is not my first speech. I thank Senator David Pocock for raising the important issue of homeownership, because Australia is a homeownership society. The ability to raise a family depends on homeownership, the likelihood of retiring in security depends on home ownership and people's engagement with community depends on homeownership. Homeowners are struggling right now not only because of the record number of rises in interest rates that we've seen under the Labor government, which means that someone with an average mortgage of $750,000 pays $2,000 more a month, but because house prices have sky-rocketed over the last decade and a half. Today, someone on a median household disposable income can only afford 13 per cent of homes in the market.

Why is this? I think it is fundamentally a supply-side issue. We are simply not building enough new homes quickly enough or cheaply enough to meet demand. In my own state of New South Wales we need to be building 55,000 new dwellings per year to meet demand. We haven't managed to do that in the past decade and a half. A comparable housing project that takes six months to get approved in Brisbane and takes 12 months to get approved in Melbourne takes 36 months to get approved in Sydney. Undoubtedly, without seeking to politicise this, this is being exacerbated by migration levels that are much higher than we have experienced in Australia. Half a million people have arrived in Australia over the past year, which is pushing rents up and making housing affordability more scarce.

We need to focus on what we can do to unlock supply, on what we can do to encourage states and local governments to accelerate land releases, to expedite planning approval and to lessen some of the compliance and red tape that currently exists in the construction industry, so we can get more houses built and on line more quickly and cheaply and get more houses for Australians.