Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's interesting to hear the member opposite reflect on his experience in South Australia, because mine, coming from the great state of Western Australia, couldn't be more different. Some nine years after the Labor Party came to government in WA, there are now fewer social homes in that state than there were when the coalition last left office in 2017. The honourable member reflected on targets, ambitions and aspirations, and it seems to be a recurrent theme, whether it's in housing or emissions, that we talk a big game but that the reality experienced by Australians is a sad miss on that high bar.

We, on this side of the House, as Liberals, want this country to be a country of homeownership—not because it should be easy, but because, if you do the right thing, if you work hard and save to build a better future for your family, then you, too, should be able to join the league of homeownership in this country. Of course, there are circumstances in which it suits a particular person at that phase of their life to rent or to board with family, friends or someone else. But the reality is that the market for housing in Australia has been distorted by the Labor Party spending more taxpayer money than ever before, and, at the same time, we're achieving worse outcomes in housing than ever before. The simple reality is that—and the Parliamentary Library has belled the cat—some $60 billion has been shovelled out the door by the Labor government; that's $23 billion in the budget, but of course some $34.4 billion has been just quietly snuck off to the side of the budget.

That is at a time when there are fewer homes being built in this country than under the previous coalition government, because we understand that you have to back the private sector to do what it does well. You have to get out of the way of developers—whether they be mums and dads looking to earn a little bit more through a side-hustle, all the way through to our biggest developers—to ensure that the supply of housing meets demand. That's the supply side, of course.

The reality is that this government has also overseen a record surge in demand for housing through net overseas migration. I note that, in this debate today, those on the government benches have studiously avoided talking about the other side of the equation. This is a market. It's supply and demand. You can't tackle one side and completely ignore the other. But the reality is, as I say, there's more money going out the door, more people coming to this country and fewer homes being built, and yet they wonder why house prices are through the roof and rents aren't far behind. In just three years, their first term, the government has presided over the biggest boom in Australia's population since the end of the Second World War. At the same time, the housing industry in Australia has delivered fewer homes.

So, as I say, it is no wonder that we have a very serious problem. But it shouldn't come as a galloping shock to those opposite, because Treasury gave them the advice that said that they would fail to meet their own aspirational target of some 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Since Labor came to power, not only have they had their own Treasury telling them that they're not going to meet this, we've seen building construction prices up by 20 per cent; homelessness getting worse, not better; and the lawlessness, thuggery, intimidation and rorts perpetrated by the CFMEU getting worse, not better, because of course one of the first things they did was to bin the ABCC. So we took away the cop on the beat trying to keep the construction industry clean. We've had record migration. We've had a collapse in the supply of new housing. Yet, still, we hear all this talk about aspiration, ambition and doing more than ever.

The reality is that Australians don't sleep at night under a roof of hot air from this government. They need a home to live in.

The coalition is a party that believes in homeownership because the home can be a cornerstone for a family and its place in the world and of course a platform from which we can raise kids and send them off into the world. Yet the reality is that, in my electorate of Forrest, I keep hearing about people with jobs and kids who are forced to live in cars in car parks. It is a shame on this government.

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