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

I thank the member for Petrie for her question, and I want to acknowledge the wonderful and uplifting first speech she gave to this chamber on Monday. She's a real up-and-comer. Landed perfectly.

One of the consistent themes of our Labor first speeches has been the experience of hardship that a lot of our new MPs have brought to this chamber, and for so many of our incoming class in 2025, nothing has been handed to them. It takes so much courage and grit to see those challenges through and to get to a point where you're standing in this place and representing your community, and, again, housing has been so central to so many of the stories we've heard and that pride in being a part of a government that's stepped up on housing.

In our first term, our government took the Commonwealth from being a negligent bystander on housing to building the boldest and most ambitious housing agenda that a Commonwealth government has had since the Second World War. We're investing $43 billion in three things. We're building more homes, we're helping renters get a better deal and we're getting more Australians into homeownership, and this is having a real impact on the lives of the people we represent. In the last term, more than 175,000 Australians got into their first home with the backing of our government, more than a million Australian households benefited from a 45 per cent increase in Commonwealth rent assistance, and half a million homes were built in our country. Home building is turning a real corner. I can report to the House that, just a few hours ago, the ABS released data that shows that building approvals are up 27.4 per cent on the previous year.

This term we're going to be doing more. We're doing more to help first home buyers and we're doing more to build more homes. I want to work with colleagues right across the parliament in order to deliver those outcomes for Australians. Indeed, I met with the crossbench yesterday. We had a really good briefing about some of the challenges that are facing us in construction. It seems to me that we've got a whole parliament of people who want to work together on this national issue, except for those opposite.

Speaker, the first move that the coalition made this term on housing—you're not going to believe it—was to try to block the construction of 80,000 desperately needed new homes. This is not what the Australian people voted for in May. The Leader of the Opposition said that she wanted to do things differently, but Tom Forrest from Urban Taskforce Australia said the move that's being made here is 'a throwback to the failed housing policies of the Dutton leadership'. The opposition has a really clear choice here. They can continue to be housing hypocrites, complaining about a crisis that they were instrumental in creating and then voting against measures to try to address it, or they can do what the Australian people so clearly are asking of this parliament, and that is for us to work together to address this critical challenge in the lives of the people we represent.

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