Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to contribute to this debate. I have a fundamental disagreement with Senator Cadell, in that I believe in the power of government to do good things. I believe in the power of good public policy to change people's lives and I believe that good government intervention can make a difference when people are suffering, when people are doing it tough and when people are struggling. I believe in the legacy of Labor governments that, through public policy, intervenes to change people's lives, help people in dire and difficult situations and lead our country through troubling times.

At the moment, there are many people in our country experiencing very significant stress when it comes to their mortgage pressures and to broader cost-of-living pressures, and, because we are a Labor government, we don't put our heads in the sand over that. We act, because we believe we can do something. We believe we have levers, through the tools of public policy, to make a difference to people's lives. That's why we have rolled out a range of cost-of-living measures to bring costs down for households. It's why we're backing in wage increases for our aged-care workers and our early childhood workers. It's why we've supported wage increases for low-income earners in Australia consecutive times. It's why we're doing everything we can to bring down the costs of medicine. It's why we're expanding paid parental leave. It's why we're providing energy bill relief worth $300 for individuals and $325 for one million small businesses.

We do these things because we know the actions of government can make a difference. We know the actions of government can change people's lives. Our housing policies are all about that as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a high ambition for what we can do in housing in Australia, because what is the alternative? The alternative is the approach taken by the Liberal and National parties when they were last in government of sticking their heads in the sand and saying: 'We can't do anything here. This isn't the role of government.' We don't believe that. We do believe it is the role of government to have a high ambition, and I don't want anything less than a high ambition.

That ambition is backed in by a suite of policy reforms—reforms which have either been blocked or delayed in this chamber for months and months and months. There are policies which would increase housing supply, which is the biggest block to solution of this housing crisis. We need to build more homes in Australia. We need those homes built by the private sector, but we also need more social housing, as well. Our policies go to all of these things. We want Australians to be able to buy their own homes. We've had bills in this place which would help tens of thousands of low- and middle-income earners get into their own home, and those bills have been blocked by the Greens, the Liberals and the Nationals. We saw the HAFF, a program which does all of these things which need to be done to increase supply in our country, delayed by months.

We have an ambitious plan, but we also have some bloody big handbrakes in this chamber in the form of the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens. They want to criticise the ambition. They want to say the ambition isn't achievable; at the same time, they are doing everything they can to ensure it fails. They are doing everything they can to stop the government taking the action and providing the frameworks that it can to solve the issues in the housing crisis. This is because they don't believe that government should be trying to make a difference. They don't believe that government should be using the tools and the levers of public policymaking that we have to help people struggling to change lives. That is fundamental to who they are.

I'm afraid there's also a fair bit of political opportunism here, because they benefit in no way from our government taking action to help people and support people, and neither do the Greens, which is why we see them spend far more time focused on their social media strategy than on building social housing in this country. We have an ambition to build 1.2 million homes. We should have no lesser ambition, but we should also be seeing in this chamber a willingness to come together and do what we can to support Australians who are struggling with mortgage stress and support millennial Australians in particular, who feel let down and locked out of the housing market. They are being told by the Liberal Party that they need to choose between having superannuation—a secure retirement—and owning their own home. They want to limit the ambitions of younger Australians in a way in which their parents' generations ambitions were never limited, and we just don't believe in that.

We believe young Australians should hold those ambitions, we believe governments can act and we believe in the power of public policy to change lives and to help people who are doing it tough and who are under pressure in this country. We will continue to do that. We will not put our heads in the sand like you did over 10 years in government.