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

I want to thank the member for Maribyrnong for her question. She is one of our gun housing advocates and her advocacy is really paying off. Our government is building a whopping 929 homes in her electorate alone. I've talked to the parliament before about the fact that those opposite built 373 homes across the country in their nine years in office. We are building 2½ times that in her electorate alone and we're just getting started. We have a housing crisis affecting our country that has been a generation in the making and the answer is that we have to build, build, build. That is exactly what our government is doing through the Housing Australia Future Fund.

Across our agenda, we have 5,000 social and affordable homes around the country complete. We have 25,000 homes that are in construction or planning. And I was really proud to announce on Sunday that the next round of the Housing Australia Future Fund will fund another 21,000 social and affordable homes. We are a government that delivers for Australians, and we do what we said we would do. We committed to Australians that we would build 55,000 social and affordable homes over five years and the announcement on the weekend clears the pathway for doing that.

I was incredibly lucky on a day last week to visit the member for Maribyrnong's electorate where we met some of the new Housing Australia Future Fund tenants that have moved into her community. This is without question the best part of my job as the minister for housing for Australia. I met Tianjin and Christine and one-month-old baby Jacob, who recently moved into a new home in the member's electorate. This beautiful young family had been living in a share house with eight families in one home. They had been on the social housing waiting list for seven years and they had a one-month-old baby.

Speaker, I can tell you that, having seen their pride and their happiness and the relief that they felt in being able to provide stable housing for their tiny little baby, I challenge any person here to meet that family and tell me that the Housing Australia Future Fund is not one of the most important things that our government is doing right now to build Australia's future. That one home has changed the life of an entire Australian family, and we're doing it 55,000 times around the country.

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