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

You would have seen about a week ago that the Prime Minister and I were together implementing a really important change for the young people of this country. As of 1 October, every single first home buyer around this country will be eligible to get into the housing market with just a five per cent deposit and our government's support. There are no income limits, there are no limits on places and, for the first time, we've got house price caps that actually reflect the cost of housing where people want to live.

In Sydney today, we see a young couple that will save, on average, around 11 years to get into the property market. The change that we are making today not only saves them tens of thousands of dollars in lenders mortgage insurance; it saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent that they won't have to pay and takes that 11-year timeframe back to two or three for people around the country. This is really meaningful support for a generation of people in this country who need and deserve our help and need it right now.

Of course, the solution to our national housing challenge is to build more homes, and that's why the majority of Labor's visionary $43 billion investment is in doing just that—and we're making really good progress. We've got housing starts in our country up 17 per cent on where they were a year ago. Our government has talked about clearing the backlog of housing applications that are under federal environmental approvals, and I can let the House know that we are now processing new housing environmental approvals at about three times the rate that we were a year ago. This builds on really important work that we did in our first term. Remember: 180,000 Australians have got into their first home while we've been in government. A million households have been supported with an almost 50 per cent increase to Commonwealth rent assistance. More than half a million homes have been built since we came to office, and we've got 25,000 social and affordable homes in planning or construction. A quick refresher: they built 373 in almost a decade in office.

We're building more homes, we're getting renters a better deal and, yes, we are getting more Australians into homeownership.

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