Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The data in Senator Bragg's question today is concerning but not shocking to Australians. It's very clear that many Australians are struggling to stay in their own homes, to pay their mortgages and to keep up with escalating rents. A big part of that, a big reason for that, is the inability, the failure, of this country to build enough homes for people to live in. We can see that ourselves on our streets as tent cities pop up all around the place. I can't believe we are now a country where many people that otherwise would not find themselves homeless have nothing but a sheet of plastic to put over their heads at night. It is disgraceful, and something should be done about it.

I'll give the government some slack here. The reduction in house-building numbers is not something the Commonwealth government can easily change overnight. A lot of the problems here are because of the planning laws at the state and local government levels. They have failed our country for many decades now and they're crucially failing us right now. But the government does have a few direct levers that it can pull to alleviate housing stress. Principally, the Commonwealth government does control our nation's borders. The previous speaker said she believed in the power of government. I'm not sure why the government has not used that power to make sure we match the number of people coming into this country with the houses that are available for Australians to live in. While we have had declining house-building approval numbers—again, not solely the responsibility of the federal government—we've had ridiculous escalating increases in the number of people coming to Australia, putting stress on the housing market.

It's important to reflect on how big these numbers are. On average, during the last coalition government, the net overseas migration number, a technical term for the difference between how many people are coming to Australia and how many people are leaving—normally more people are coming than leaving—each 12-month period had 226,000 more people coming to Australia than leaving. That was the average net overseas migration rate. In the two full years that this government has been in power, which we have data for, that average figure has been 493,000. So it was 226,000—I should say the 226,000 is pre-COVID. I took out the COVID years. That would have been an unfair comparison for the government, so I took out the COVID years. So pre-COVID, under the former government, it was 226,000. In the two years this government has been in office, it has been almost 500,000 people a year. There have been more people coming here than leaving every year.

As Senator Bragg said in his question, we're building less than 160,000 homes a year. There are 500,000 people turning up, and we're only building 160,000 homes a year. Of course, some houses every year are condemned and have to be knocked down. Okay, maybe it's two people per home or whatever—it's about that. We're building way less homes than we should be with the people coming in.

So why hasn't the government capped the numbers? Why have they allowed so many people into this country and caused this mess, where Australians do not have a home to live in? They were managing the borders and they had the job of reopening after COVID. Of course we had to take some migrants in after COVID, after we had closed our borders for a few years, but why do we need to take in the size of Canberra every year—Canberra is at around 500,000 people now—when we're not building a city anywhere close to the size of Canberra in terms of homes around the country? That is what has happened. It is the government's responsibility to fix it.

This figure is remarkable—that they have allowed this to persist for two years. The previous maximum year for net overseas migration was back in 2008, the last time a Labor Party was in government, when Kevin Rudd wanted to build a big Australia. That was 315,000 people a year. That's still 170,000—180,000, in fact—short of where the government has found themselves on average over the last two years. This is why the government should be tossed out, because they can't manage the fundamental, first requirement of any Australian government: to secure our nation's borders and make sure they use the control they have over those borders for the benefit of the people in this country first. They have failed at that task, and now it's average Australians that are paying the price of that failure.

Question agreed to.