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

I thank the member for Aston for her question. She has just ticked over the thousandth young person in her community who is into their first home with our government's backing, and there are plenty more where that came from.

Too many Australians feel that the housing market is stacked against them, and what is so frustrating, especially for the young people of our country, is that they're doing all the right things. They're saving hard, they're working hard and they're studying hard, and yet, still, they turn up to auctions with the deck stacked against them. That is what our government is seeking to change. That is why we are levelling the playing field for first home buyers through our budget housing reforms.

For 25 years, the Sunday morning reports on Saturday's auctions have told us, pretty much universally, the same thing—that first home buyers are getting pipped by investors and that more and more homes are out of reach for young people. But, for the last two weekends, we have started to read something very, very different. Across the country, first home buyers are snapping up homes. We read of a single mum buying a home for her family in St Kilda East; a young couple buying their first home in Yarraville, telling the paper that they'd given up on buying in that particular suburb; four first home buyers competing against each other at an auction in Ardeer, all on a level playing field. One auctioneer told the paper that the first home buyers of this country were 'up and about'. That is exactly the point.

By the time of the next election, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young people around our country will be in their own home, directly because of our government's first home ownership policies. I want every single one of them to know that it was a Labor government that saw their ambition, that saw their aspiration and that stepped in to help them realise it.

I'm asked about alternatives and risks, and, by God, there is one on the table, because those opposite want to scrap all of the arrangements that are making this possible. They want to get rid of the five per cent deposit program because, according to them, this is about supporting the children of billionaires. They want to get rid of Help to Buy, and now they want to scrap the level playing field that we are creating for first home buyers. What you are now continually seeing in this debate is that we're for change; these people are for the broken status quo. And they are the only ones defending it. Increasingly, they are the only people defending a broken system that locks people around this country out of homeownership.

I'm getting lots of backchat here, but I'd be pretty embarrassed too if I had been raised in the party of homeownership that has turned on the young people of this country with the force that those opposite have. We're creating a fairer situation for the young people of this country, but I want Australians to know that every piece of this will be unwound by those opposite.

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