Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sometimes it's nice to have a little bit of positivity, and the positivity is that the Albanese government has an ambitious $32 billion Homes for Australia plan to make housing more affordable for all Australians, whether you're building, renting or buying. We've said many times that Australians are doing it tough, and we understand that housing is a big part of that problem. But the problem is a generation in the making. It is not something that has happened overnight. It's a failure of the housing market but also a failure of governments, many governments, over a period of time. And so the buck-passing stops with us. It stops with the Albanese Labor government through our ambitious $32 billion Homes for Australia plan.

We have an ambitious housing agenda, with $32 billion of commitments to help Australians to build, to rent and to buy. Again, we have that ambitious goal of building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade. And, through the fee-free TAFE and other processes and policies that we've put in place, we're training more tradies than we've seen trained for a very long period of time. We're building more infrastructure and social homes and cutting red tape to make this happen. Personally, I've been involved in many openings of social homes that we have assisted state governments and social housing operators to actually build.

Building more homes is a long-term fix. We know that. But we know that Australians are doing it tough right now. That's why we're helping renters by strengthening renters' rights and boosting rent assistance, and we're helping more than one-third of first home buyers get into the market with lower deposits. These are things that incrementally can help while we're building these other houses.

You can't trust the coalition to fix the problem. They were in office for two of the last three decades when this problem got worse, and now they want to make it worse by cutting $19 billion from housing. And the Greens just want to play politics. They block more houses in their local community, and they block more houses in Parliament House.

I want to go through a bit of a record and our solution. Since we've been in government, we've taken action and we're working to deliver more homes for Australians and to tackle the challenges left behind after a decade of little action in housing and homelessness by the former Liberal-National government. The opposition claim to care about housing, but their record shows otherwise. We're investing in 55,000 social and affordable homes, the largest Commonwealth investment in decades. The coalition have said that they will scrap Labor's $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund. This will halt construction on thousands of social homes across Australia. So, while they stand up here and say they want to help people, they actually want to cut the fund that is going to help thousands of people get into social housing right across Australia.

We're strengthening renters' rights through our better deal for renters, and we've increased Commonwealth rent assistance by more than 40 per cent. The opposition have been silent on renters' rights and did nothing in 10 years to address this issue. This government's ministers for housing and homelessness—both Minister Collins previously and now Minister O'Neil—have chaired nine meetings with state and territory housing ministers to ensure all levels of government are working together to improve housing outcomes for Australians. Unlike our government, which is bringing states and territories together, the opposition didn't even have a meeting of housing ministers for almost five years. We've already done that, but they couldn't bring them together for five years.

The government is proposing cutting taxes to build more affordable rental homes through our build-to-rent legislation. The opposition raised taxes on investment in build-to-rent housing, making it harder to build rental homes. Labor has introduced legislation to establish our Help to Buy Scheme, a shared-equity scheme to help 40,000 Australians get into homeownership. The opposition, as we know and as I've said previously, teamed up with the Greens to block the bill in the Senate, yet they come in here and ask: what are we doing for housing? We have got a long record of what we're doing. They have a record of saying no. They've got a record of blocking. The coalition operators up there in the back corner have joined with the Greens to block all the assistance for people to get into homes in a much quicker way.