Cameron Caldwell (Fadden, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On the Gold Coast, families work hard and small businesses sometimes open when their owners get back from a surf, and it's a place where young Australians still dream to have a home that they can call their own. The Liberal and National parties have always stood for that dream: homeownership, personal responsibility and a government that empowers, not controls. We are, and always have been, the party of homeownership.

Under Labor, sadly the dream of homeownership is fast becoming a nightmare. The Minister for Housing, Ms O'Neil, promised that she had a plan. But unfortunately what's been delivered is nothing more than press releases and slogans. We're certainly just towards the end of maiden-speech season, which made me reflect on my own, which I delivered on 4 September 2023. In that speech, I reflected on the importance of homeownership, and I'll read from that speech:

I was fortunate enough to buy my first property during the time of the Howard government … I fear that the great Australian dream is being snatched away. We must strive … to increase homeownership. There is no better way to illustrate the collective ambition of our nation to have individual freedom and responsibility than to have people own their own home. Give as many people as possible the opportunity to have a stake in our nation.

And my feelings on this topic have not wavered. We must strive to give Australians their piece of our nation.

I think there's a lot of focus on housing policy and on what the housing minister has or hasn't done, but I don't want to let the Treasurer off the hook here. One of the little-referred-to barriers is that higher interest rates become a barrier to buying. Your average dual-income family could have the capacity to borrow $100,000 more if interest rates were just one per cent lower. But what we've seen under the Albanese Labor government is that inflation has stayed too high for too long, and the Reserve Bank's response has been that, sadly, for every mortgage-paying Australian and every Australian that dreams of homeownership, mortgage rates have had to stay higher because interest rates must control the mechanisms that are resulting from the Treasurer's high-spending agenda.

We must be realistic about this. Australia is facing a housing crisis, and the Albanese government are the ones to blame. When they took office, their ambitious plan promised 1.2 million homes over five years, and it sounded impressive—until, recently, we of course started to see what's going on in reality. The Housing Industry Association, backed by Treasury, has revealed the truth—that this actually quite modest target is going to be missed by some 400,000 homes. Labor announced the headline-grabbing $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, which, after all the fanfare and all the glossy photo ops, has constructed just 17 homes. To put it bluntly, a $10 billion program delivering just 17 homes is like promising to build a Surfers Paradise high-rise and turning up with a garden shed.

On the Gold Coast, Labor's failure to deliver housing is hitting hard. Families are battling rising rents. House prices keep climbing out of reach. Homebuyers are being pushed further and further away from the communities they grew up in. Renters are living in fear of the next lease renewal, knowing a hike or notice to vacate could upend their lives. The fundamental problem is that Labor has been pushing demand up while supply goes backwards. Net overseas migration topped half a million people last year, the biggest surge in our history, but the number of new homes being built has fallen. This is basic economics. More people but fewer houses equals higher prices, higher rents and ultimately more homeless people when the system fails.

Building homes is not just about turning dirt. It requires affordable materials, a skilled workforce and a planning system that can approve projects quickly, but right now materials are expensive, tradies are in short supply, and approvals are being bogged down in red tape. Instead of fixing those problems, Labor has chosen to clog the system with more bureaucracy, just papering it over with their photo-friendly announcements.

We've heard that one of their great solutions is to freeze the construction code, but over the last three years this government has been addicted to adding regulation. There is not a single regulation that this government doesn't want to just wrap its arms around and bring into the fold. So the freeze has come literally three years too late. When it was served up as an option at the last election, Labor, of course, criticised it, but now they've rebadged it and brought it back as their own idea.

I think, despite the fanfare around housing this week, the Prime Minister knows that his minister is in trouble on this issue. Minister O'Neil used to sit somewhere right over there, not far behind the PM. She's now moved so far down the bench she's practically out the door. In fact, the real measure of her seniority is that she's further away from the PM than the member for Sydney—and we all know what that means: you're really out of favour. I think he sees failure on the horizon. He knows that it's coming, because Minister O'Neil has a track record of failures in foreign affairs, and now she's developing a track record of failures in housing.

In three short years, Labor has presided over the biggest population boom we've seen in the post-war era. When I talked about that housing target earlier, under the coalition government, almost 200,000 homes were being constructed each year. So this wasn't some whopping great ambitious target. It was just for the headline. It should have been able to be delivered by a competent government, but what we've seen is that this government is falling further and further behind. Their target is slipping further and further out of reach. It's slumped now to about 170,000 homes a year, which, quite frankly, is not going to get us there in an environment where we need more not fewer homes.

One of the great things that those opposite love to say is that we didn't have a housing minister during the last coalition government. My good friend the member for Casey, who is a proud Victorian, provided to me earlier documentary evidence to prove this to be completely incorrect. Here's just one fact: the then minister for housing and assistant treasurer, the Hon. Michael Sukkar, put out a press release on 12 September 2019. Interestingly, the topic of this press release was, in fact, the scheme that Labor has rebadged, reheated and reannounced this week. I know how much the Labor Party loved the Hon. Michael Sukkar, and we've heard a lot about how good this policy is this week. They really should be talking up the vision of the Morrison coalition government, because we are clearly the ones who, six years ago, were trying to guide this government towards a solution. I think that a lot of credit should be given to Michael Sukkar for his work in this area. The Australian dream is not to rent nicely; it's to own your own home, and we must get back to that objective.

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