Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Anyone in Sydney in the last week or so who thinks a lot about housing would have been absolutely perplexed with some of the reactions to boost housing supply in Sydney, especially the reaction of Woollahra council to the New South Wales government's proposal to build higher density homes close to the city but with infrastructure to be built alongside it. We had the Woollahra council reject that proposition of higher density homes being built in Woollahra. As someone from Western Sydney who has grown up and seen fields transformed into rows and rows of mortar and rooftop tiles continually, we would love the idea that you would have infrastructure built at the same time as housing, because I've got to tell you that that hasn't happened for quite some time.

Full credit to the Minns government for coming up with the idea that they would provide that in there. In our neck of the woods, we're still waiting for the completion of the missing link of the metro, while all these homes get built and there is no infrastructure, yet Woollahra council seem to have walked into a stable full of gift horses and made sure they didn't miss the opportunity to smack each one of them in the mouth by rejecting a plan that would build infrastructure and homes in a city where we do need to find places where we can get the critical workers that are important to cities. The nurses, the teachers, the cleaners, the mechanics—all the people who help modern cities function but who are being pushed to the furthest fringes of the city and made to travel at the weirdest hours of the day just to start their shifts, after having travelled probably over two hours to get to work—we've got to be able to have homes for those folks, who make sure our cities run, and ensure that they're built in the face of nimbyism, which certainly is the case for the Woollahra council decision, and we've got to think laterally about how to address supply.

I'm proud to be part of a government that's doing just that. We all recognise that we have to build more homes, and we have to do it in a range of different ways. If I can pick up on something the last speaker said, the member for Fowler, who talked about what's at the heart of what we're discussing here in the parliament at the moment—the five per cent deposit—we can't just rely on one thing. No-one from the government is suggesting that. We've actually got multiple options that are designed to address a housing crisis that has been decades in the making and to make sure that we provide relief to people.

I've got to tell you, the fact that we are enabling first home buyers to get their homes sooner, with a five per cent deposit, is a big deal. Here's the stat that tells you why it's a big deal: today it takes someone on the median income around 12 years just to save for a deposit. Back in the nineties, it took four to five years, so you can see how those times have absolutely blown out. We've got to address it, and we're bringing forward the ability for first home buyers to get access to that scheme, slashing the amount of time required to save for a deposit and uncapping the scheme, which is a terrific move. Also, for single parents, I might add, we'll continue the Family Home Guarantee, which helps them buy a home with a two per cent deposit. It's a terrific way to be able to do that. We need to be able to open up those avenues for first home buyers to buy their homes.

I know that, in my part of Western Sydney, this is a big issue. Later this month I'll be hosting a housing forum in my area to see how we can boost the building of social and affordable homes in Chifley in the outer western suburbs. We need to see more of that happen. We also need to see more homes built for people fleeing terrible situations such as domestic violence and to be able to provide crisis accommodation as well. We need to get that happening. I'm pleased to say that the New South Wales housing minister, Rose Jackson, will be coming along, and we'll be getting other experts in the field to talk through how we can create more social and affordable housing in the areas that I represent in my part of Western Sydney. Types of measures like what we're talking about today will be exceptionally important.

We've got to build more homes, we've got to improve the range of homes that are being built, and we've also got to help renters. People want to be able to buy their own home, for sure, but they need to live somewhere in the interim. We've got big challenges, though, in building homes. In the construction trades, we're 90,000 short of people available to build homes. How are you supposed to do that?

We also have competition. If you get more workers in to work in construction, you're instantly in competition with infrastructure projects, who are offering higher rates of pay for workers to go there. So, the minute you get people in construction, they get poached by infrastructure. That's a big deal. Also, we cannot keep importing labour to fill the gaps, which means we've got to find new ways to build homes.

One of those ways is certainly prefab and modular housing, which'll help us build homes faster and smarter. For people who think that those homes are just akin to the school demountables that they lived in, they clearly haven't walked through a prefab home that has been built recently with current, seven-star energy efficiency standards and is a comfortable place to be able to live. We need to do more of this. In Japan, it's estimated that 15 per cent of their homes have been manufactured in a factory. In Germany, that's up to 20 per cent, and in Scandinavia it could be anywhere between 45 to 80 per cent. We've got to be able to have these modern manufacturing methods being used to build homes faster and smarter. In doing so, according to the Productivity Commission, you cut 20 per cent off the construction costs and halve the time it takes to build these homes. It creates a great manufacturing opportunity. I've seen it in the western suburbs with places like Fleetwood in Smithfield, who are doing great work in being able to build a home in a factory, take it on the back of a truck and build it on site, which is particularly important.

We should use procurement to ramp this up. Future rounds of the HAFF should focus on using procurement and set a challenge to have the greatest number of prefab homes built using Australian industry and Australian manufacturers to do so. We should provide that platform of procurement and have the HAFF do that so that we can get the guarantee for the volume of supply. In other countries, prefab has fallen over because we have not seen governments provide the volume of work and the certainty of work that prefab manufacturers require to build their homes. We need more of that to be able to happen.

And Australians, according to Amplify, want to be able to move into prefabricated homes. In fact, the advocacy group Amplify said that 95 per cent plus support reform aimed at unlocking modern housing, community support for the reform grows as people learn more about prefabricated building and the opportunity for debate, and 94 per cent strongly agree there should be diverse housing options for all. Interestingly, Amplify found that people of all politics backed the reform. There's broad consensus, and all generations back that reform, which is important as well. We do need to unlock that. As a government, we have put some money in to back that in. I don't think we've put anywhere near enough. We need to put more in and be able to have HAFF do it.

But it's one of those great things about certain areas of policy that get put into Treasury—it takes a little bit longer to get ideas out the door. I often find Treasury is a great place for ideas to go to die, but housing being put in Treasury is probably one of the areas where I've always raised my eyebrows as to why it sits there. Treasury needs to probably—this is a subject for another day—get a clear focus on what its core functions are, but housing is in there for whatever reason. I'll be interested to see if Treasury does back the need for more prefab homes to be built and for us to be able to provide the existing procurement pathways for that to occur.

I just want to end on the coalition. The coalition did nothing through their time in government and are using their time in opposition to oppose everything when it comes to what we're doing on housing. They hardly built enough homes under their watch, certainly nowhere near the amount of social and affordable housing that we needed. Interestingly, now they're setting up this debate that renting is worse than buying. We heard that from the member for Cook. I wouldn't want us to look down our nose at what needs to be done to get roofs over people's heads. People want a range of options, and I would hate to think that the next battleline here is to oppose build-to-rent as one of the areas that we think is important to create more homes in Australia. (Time expired)

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