Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The supply of affordable housing in Australia, particularly in the capital cities and the large regional centres, is at the centre of a great range of social service challenges currently facing the nation. Housing is a basic human right and, despite the significant investment by governments to date, more needs to be done to ensure that all Australians have access to stable and affordable housing. In what we refer to now as a gap year, when I finished school I volunteered for a year and with the De La Salle Brothers started up a youth crisis centre for kids who were living rough, so I have a pretty good understanding of what it is like for young people to be homeless.

I know that no single level of government can act alone on this issue. Solutions that increase the supply of affordable housing while not undermining the overall strength of Australia's housing industry can only be found by all levels of government working together. Solutions must be collaborative, innovative and consistent across the nation, which is why the government will openly work with all Australian states and territories and, importantly, with local government area authorities who control the planning, zoning and land release mechanisms which are vital to increase the supply of housing.

The coalition recognises that homelessness is a complex issue that affects too many Australians. Solving it takes more than just rhetoric; it requires a long-term and systematic effort across all levels of government, agencies, business sectors and the broader community. In July 2015, after Labor's neglect, the coalition took the responsible step of restoring funding for the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, the NPAH, by providing $230 million over two years, to be matched by the states, to fund frontline homelessness services in communities across this nation. In March 2016, the various ministers responsible for this program in each state and territory agreed to receive a report on future arrangements and funding options for NPAH by the end of 2016, which will feed into the COAG report.

Further to this, the coalition has finalised a number of initiatives to encourage new and innovative solutions to provide housing for people with a disability, including finalising the Specialist Disability Accommodation Pricing and Payments Framework, which will enable the National Disability Insurance Agency to establish a competitive price that attracts market players to supplying new and appropriate dwelling stock under the NDIS for people with a disability. The coalition is allocating $10 million to the Specialist Disability Accommodation Initiative to encourage the completion of housing projects for people with a disability outside of NDIS trial sites, and it is establishing housing pilot projects in NDIS trial sites. In February 2016, the coalition established the Affordable Housing Working Group to investigate ways to boost the supply of affordable rental housing through innovative finance models. Additionally, in the 2016-17 budget the government has committed to implementing a compulsory Rent Deduction Scheme for social housing and welfare recipients to help them sustain their tenancies and reduce the risk of eviction.

It would be remiss of me to ignore the hypocrisy and neglect of this issue from the Labor Party. It would come as no surprise that under Labor's administration of the National Rental Affordability Scheme, money was shovelled out the door with no accountability and no responsibility. From the very beginning, the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government scheme was poorly designed with multiple flaws, ambiguous legal requirements and mountains of red tape. Predictably, it was slow on delivery and it failed to meet its own targets. In fact, the usual hallmarks of Labor policy manifested themselves yet again with this scheme, in that more effort went into the announcement of the scheme than actually making it work. As always, the devil was in the detail—or lack of it—and they failed to put in the work in the planning stages in order to see the successful implementation of a scheme that promised so much. Since then, the best that Labor has been able to come up with are proposed changes to negative gearing that have been very poorly thought through, a housing tax plan that would deliver a reckless trifecta— (Time expired)

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