Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

On the whole question of housing affordability, which the NATSEM report goes to, you have to deal with the inflation-interest rates challenge and you have to deal with the other housing policy settings. We have put forward one such policy. On the question of the pre-election commitment which we made on the first home saver accounts, we stand by everything we put to the Australian people, including the eligibility criteria that we outlined there. We believe this is a good piece of public policy, and the reason is that it is the first time it has been embraced in this country. For 12 years, those opposite sat silently, idly by while so many working families, so many Australians, dealing with the mortgage challenge they faced as a consequence of successive interest rate rises were simply left to languish. The response by those opposite, the party of new-found compassion, was in these words: ‘Working families have never been better off.’

Let me conclude by saying this: our pre-election commitments on housing, which are $1.6 billion more than those opposite—the new-found party of compassion—will actually be honoured. We do not divide them into core promises and non-core promises. One of those commitments was the first home saver accounts. The criteria for the first home saver accounts were articulated clearly before the election. We have a mandate to implement them in the manner in which they were put to the people, and implementing them we are.

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