Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've listened to all the contributions here this afternoon and I was most enlightened by the contributions of Senator Bragg, who rose to take note of an answer given by Senator Gallagher in relation to homeownership. What struck me most was Senator Bragg's observation, quite rightly, that the Labor government in this country have effectively given up on homeownership in this country. I think that's the takeaway line from this afternoon. I know we've heard a lot of good stuff in here, but that, to me, was the moment.

In one sense it's fairly reminiscent of what we say on this side of the chamber about the Labor Party's approach to working people. We have the Labor Party over there, who are constantly telling us they're on the side of the battler. Every single day we hear that. They're on the side of the blue-collar worker—except all they do every day is make life harder for those people by trying to parrot their unachievable net zero fantasy, which is doing nothing but raising power prices, raising the cost of living and making life hard, but, as we know, keeping the dangerous emissions down for a country that produces just over one per cent of the world's emissions. That is probably off topic.

We are seeing from this government now the supply of new homes in this country crashing to, I think, their lowest level in over a decade in the next couple of years. This is the convergence of two crises. It's the convergence of a number of policy levers that haven't been pulled—the emergency chain—by this government. One of them is, as Senator Bragg pointed out, the increase in immigration—the reckless immigration target. I think it's 600,000 we're likely to be up to in the year ending September. That's 600,000 people that have got to find homes, or less. Three hundred thousand homes or whatever the target is, it is more than this government has the ability to provide.

That's at the same time that, as I said, the cost of living is increasing and, also, rental affordability is absolutely skyrocketing. Minister Gallagher, when she gave her answer today, this afternoon, in question time, did what we hear so frequently during question time, which was to simply obfuscate the answer by saying, 'We've set targets.' I've set a few targets in my life. I didn't actually set the target, but I would have loved to play a professional sport. But guess what? I didn't have a plan or the ability. But that's not the point.

The point is that setting targets is no good unless you've got a plan to back it up. This government doesn't have a plan to back it up in terms of housing increase. It's just not there. None of the government's approaches to date have actually done anything, a bit like me practising kicking for goal—it didn't do anything; I kept spraying them around all over the place. The same is true here. We've seen example after example of that. The Help to Buy scheme—the government introduced it, and at best it was set to deliver 10,000 homes and it cost the Commonwealth $5.5 billion. It seems like they've set a target to spend a lot of money, because that's certainly one they're achieving. The Housing Australia Future Fund, the HAFF, as it was referred to, brings absolutely no guarantees of an increased supply and no guarantees that taxpayers will see positive returns from the fund's investments. But, once again, it's set to cost us big bucks. Spending—that's one thing we know about. The National Housing Accord has a target—good, we've got another target!—of 1.2 million homes, and it's already out of reach.

What does this actually mean? We're now seeing across capital cities something in the order of 79,000 new homes to be finished by 2026. That's, I think, a drop of 26 per cent compared to the last year. When you factor into that the lack of attention—the real thing that'll help here of course is removing red tape. Ask anyone that has built a home or is about to build a home about how difficult it is to get approvals, with the various layers. Why doesn't the government do something to address that as an issue? They could set a target for that, do nothing about it and then do something about it, and it'll fail. That's seemingly the approach from this side of the chamber.

The question then becomes: what would we do? We'd do what we said at the last election. We established the super homebuyer scheme to allow first home buyers to invest up to 40 per cent of their superannuation, and the list goes on.

Question agreed to.