House debates

Wednesday, 28 September 2022

Matters of Public Importance

Housing

3:21 pm

Photo of Julie CollinsJulie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I genuinely want to thank the member for Mayo, the crossbenchers and the member for Curtin for raising what is really a very serious issue. Housing affordability across the country really is a very desperate challenge for many Australians—for far too many Australians. It is incredibly difficult for too many Australians to find a safe, affordable place to call home.

Indeed, as a local member—and even before I became the Minister for Housing and Minister for Homelessness—I had seen quite a change in the last 18 months. As a local member for 14 years, I had not seen so many people contact my electorate office or come to see a local member of parliament about insecure housing. Many of them were actually at risk of homelessness. Surprisingly, there were two-income families with children coming to say that their lease was up and there was actually nowhere to rent. Whether they could afford it or not, there was actually nothing available. I know that in my home state of Tasmania, the vacancy rate for renters in Hobart is less than 0.4 per cent. And I know it's pretty diabolical in Adelaide, Perth and other parts across the country. It really is a very critical issue, and we do need to do better—we absolutely need to do better. Indeed, the last census, back in 2016, said that there were 116,000 Australians who had nowhere to call home. I am concerned about when we get the data next year from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that it would have increased significantly. I'm very concerned about that.

I understand how important having a safe and affordable place to call home is. I'm one of the few members in this place who has lived it. I spent my early childhood in a broadacre public housing estate—indeed, the poorest suburb in Tasmania at the time. Like the Prime Minister, I know how difficult it was for my family to lift us out of poverty and how difficult it can be. But it should be possible—it should be possible in Australia and, sadly, I think it has become less possible than it used to be. The member for Mayo is absolutely right: for the last decade, under those opposite over there, we've had very little action when it comes to a coherent national strategy or policy around housing and homelessness. Indeed, some of their policies, as the member for Mayo indicated, have increased the cost of houses. What we've seen in the last decade is construction costs up 46 per cent—half of that in the last 2½ years. We do understand that some of it's in relation to the pandemic and supply chain issues in relation to the Ukraine war, but it is increasing the cost of building new homes.

There are also of course really significant constraints in the construction industry at the moment. They are averaging about 200,000 new dwellings across Australia each year, and of course the completions are the issue, because there simply isn't the labour and there aren't the materials to build much more than that. That is the critical point here. In our discussions with the construction sector, and indeed with the industry more broadly, what we're hearing from them is that they expect things to ease in the second half of next year—as I've discussed with quite a few members of the crossbench who have come to see me or have written to me who are concerned about this issue. Indeed, we did go to the election with a fairly ambitious housing agenda, in terms of housing reform, so I do just want to run through, for the crossbench, our housing agenda.

We are going to have our Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee scheme. That starts this weekend. We've brought that forward because we know that, for many people living in regional Australia, rents have increased considerably and many of those who are paying rent could service a mortgage. But we know that that 20 per cent deposit is a barrier that they can't get over. So, with a deposit of as little as five per cent, we can get more people into their first home, with those 10,000 places across the country from 1 October.

We also understand that this is an immediate issue and some of our other reforms will take a bit of time, and, through the Jobs and Skills Summit and the discussions that we had there, we understand that, in particular, workers' access to housing has been really critical. So we are widening the remit of the National Housing Infrastructure Facility. Previously it was available just for head works, for local governments and state governments, but that fund wasn't being utilised. So there will be up to $575 million available for investment in social and affordable housing. What we also want to do with that is to try to leverage private investment and investment from superannuation funds, to try and get more homes on the ground sooner, while we legislate our Housing Australia Future Fund and then invest that and wait for the returns from that. So those are two things that we're doing really quickly that we want to be able to get to work on.

We also, of course, have had two ministerial council meetings—meetings with state colleagues. Now, when I had the first meeting in July, it was the first meeting of housing ministers in almost five years. That shows the lack of leadership that we've had. It was a terrific meeting. The enthusiasm and encouragement from the state ministers left me feeling quite optimistic that we could actually get some movement here. Then we had another meeting at the end of the last sitting week, where we talked more about how we were going to work together. We all have a view that not one tier of government alone will solve this—that we're going to need all three tiers of government, but working, importantly, with homelessness services, social housing providers, investors and superannuation funds. We all need to be working together and heading in the same direction if we're going to try and solve this housing affordability issue that we have at the moment. Unfortunately, some of that is going to take some time. That is why we're doing some of those immediate actions now.

We also made an election commitment around the government equity scheme, to get more people into a home, and that is available even for people who've owned a home before but currently don't own a home. So it might address some of those older women who have not been able to maintain a family home after divorce and things like that. That's the Help to Buy scheme. We're looking at how quickly we can introduce that. That is government equity of up to 30 per cent for existing homes and up to 40 per cent for new homes. So we're working on that quickly.

The Housing Australia Future Fund I've talked about. That is 30,000 social and affordable homes—20,000 social homes and 10,000 affordable homes—in the first five years of the fund. From our conversations with social housing providers, the construction sector and the state and territory governments, as well as local government, we think that that will be achievable.

We are concerned, though, about some of the constraints in the construction sector at this time. We also want to get up an affordability and supply council. We need to look at some of those critical issues that are stopping more properties coming onto the market more quickly. What can we do? Which tiers of government have the levers?

But, importantly, we also need to ask: what is the evidence around what those interventions actually do to the market? We need to have more evidence based policy about the interventions that are taking place and how they're impacting across the sector, because there are so many inputs into the housing sector in Australia. You can do something on one bit and it impacts everywhere else. We need to be really careful about the interventions and innovations that we're doing, so we understand exactly the impact it's having across affordability in the entire housing spectrum. We want to get that affordability and supply council up and running. I'm hoping to have it up and running late this year or early next year. Then, more long-term, we want a housing and homelessness plan, whereby we have short-term, medium-term and long-term agreements on which direction we're heading in. We need to be able to work together and we need to be able to say, 'This is what we are all going to do in the short term, the medium term and the long term.' The other thing we need is some accountability around that and some measurement about how we are travelling in terms of what our plan is and where we want to be.

We do need to do a lot of work; we need to bring a lot of people together and get a lot of agreement. So it's not going to be an easy task, but I can assure the members that I have been from Gladstone all the way down to Greater Hobart in my own state, talking to stakeholders, talking to the construction sector, talking to homelessness providers, talking to people with lived experience of homelessness, talking to many of the people that are writing to me and talking to me about the critical situation that we're in right across the country.

I've also got a lot of caucus members over here who are critically concerned about this really serious issue and who are contacting me and making sure that the government doesn't lose sight of how critical this is for people in their electorates as well. We are all getting this, as the member for Mayo said, in our electorate offices. I have never seen it quite so much. We need to do a lot more to make sure that more Australians have a safe, affordable place to call home, and I'll be doing my best every single day.

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