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

I thank the member for Clark. We also, of course, want to develop a National Housing and Homelessness Plan, and we do want to work with the other tiers of government. There's no one tier of government that's going to be able to solve this alone. We've had two meetings already of state and territory housing ministers. The first, which we had in July, was the first meeting in almost five years because, of course, we inherited a system where those on the other side did very little when it came to housing affordability across this country. We're also going to introduce a National Housing Supply and Affordability Council to ensure that the Commonwealth does play a leadership role in ensuring housing supply and improving housing affordability. There'll be details on these reforms in the budget tonight.

Importantly, the initiatives and reforms need to be sustainable and lead to long-term, permanent housing for those that need it most. We learnt the lesson the hard way from those opposite when we saw important housing programs abolished, like one of the ones the member refers to. NRAS was abolished, of course, by Tony Abbott back in 2014. The reforms that we're proposing will permanently boost the supply of affordable housing and take pressure off the rental market as well as addressing social housing problems. When too many Australians don't have a safe place to call home, we can't afford to waste a day, and we absolutely won't.

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