Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Brisbane for her question. She's already a fierce advocate for delivering more homes in her community, and I know she takes great pride in being part of a government which is tackling the housing crisis from every angle.

We've got a housing crisis in our country because for 40 years our country hasn't been building enough homes. That's why most of the $43 billion we are investing to address this problem is going to building, building, building. We're making really important progress on this. In the last term in parliament about half a million homes were built around the country, and we're on the pathway to 55,000 desperately needed social and affordable homes to come online. As a nation, we've got to do more. No-one accepts that more than our government. That's why, in our second term, we're going to build on these foundations and go bigger, bolder and faster.

I'm asked about alternative approaches. We have seen quite a few. First, we saw the coalition spend nine wasteful years in government doing absolutely nothing about this problem. You'll remember me mentioning last term that the coalition were so checked out of housing as an issue that for most of the time they were in government they didn't even have a housing minister. They spent the last three years in opposition in this parliament trying to slow us down or block our positive approaches. They delayed housing for people experiencing homelessness, they delayed housing for women and children fleeing family violence and they delayed new housing coming onto the mainstream housing market. Then they brought to the election something I thought I would never see: a housing policy that would have built fewer homes in this country and made existing housing more expensive through their dud 'super for housing' policy.

I didn't think this could get any worse. Indeed, I approached this parliament with a sense of hope and optimism. We got the first question in the parliament on housing—I felt fantastic about that—and we had an opposition saying they wanted to be constructive. But yesterday my hopes were absolutely dashed. The first move this opposition have decided to make on housing is to try to bulldoze the construction of 80,000 desperately needed new rental homes—80,000 new quality rental homes. Trying to block this proposal is crazy, is bizarre and is exactly the opposite of what our country needs to be doing.

It makes me really worried that they have learnt nothing and heard nothing from the very clear message on housing that was sent to all of us at the May election. Our government is back to work. We're focused on the cost of living, on housing and on Medicare. The coalition are busy fighting culture wars against non-existent enemies and taking the old coalition brand of destruction and dysfunction into the new term. Now, they have a choice this parliament: are they going to continue to be housing hypocrites, or are they going to come with us and work on this great national challenge that our government is confronting?

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