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

I thank the member for Bullwinkel for her question. It was absolutely wonderful to be in Western Australia with pretty much our whole team WA caucus having a big forum to talk about what's next for housing in Western Australia. We have got incredible advocates fighting for that great state here in our parliament on the Labor side of politics. The discussion at that forum was all about how we get our country building more homes and how we get more young people across our nation getting into that incredible aspiration of owning the home that they live in. Of course, that is what the federal budget was all about—building more homes for Australia and making sure that we back in more young people to get a fair go at auctions.

Speaker, in the Australia that you and I grew up in, ordinary people on normal incomes could get into homeownership after saving for just a handful of years. This was a central part of what made Australia a fair and equal country at that time. But that has changed. The average time it takes for a young person to save a 20 per cent deposit in Sydney today has gone up to 17 years. Something's got to give, and that's why our government has stepped in so significantly. After a decade of ignorance of this problem and total neglect of it, we're stepping in. We're building more homes, we're backing more first home buyers and we're levelling the playing field at auction.

Just this last weekend gone, we had yet another Sunday of reporting about the auctions that had happened on Saturday and story after story about first home buyers being at the front of the queue and winning for the first time in a generation. Speaker, you would have read in the Nine papers the report of a young couple who bought their first home at auction in Coburg North in Victoria. This was a three-bedroom home that had been owned by the same family since 1972. This young couple were able to compete because they were supported through Labor's help to buy scheme. The young couple were very frank when they were interviewed by the newspaper. They said, 'We could not have done this without help to buy.'

Help to buy is a program that helps 10,000 Australian families on low and moderate incomes get into homeownership in circumstances where they'd otherwise have no real opportunity to do that. We're adding on top of this 260,000 Australians who have gotten into first home ownership through our five per cent deposit program and, on top of that, 75,000 Australians who will get into first home ownership because of our budget measures. These measures are incredibly popular with the young first home buyers in all of our electorates. Why is that the case? Because the problem was never about aspiration and drive. The problem was about opportunity, and our government is stepping in. We are creating better opportunities for the young people of this country, and they are winning at auctions for the first time in a generation.

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