Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

I note today that the government has secured the passage of the tax bills through the Senate. I think that this is a significant day and that this really marks a turning point in what we have seen over the last 20 years, where housing has become more of an investment than a place to live and a place for a family to call its home. I think, like Paul Keating said, when you change the government you change the country, and what you've seen from the Albanese Labor government is a commitment to change and to keep changing to fix the mess that we've seen created largely over the last 30 years of mainly coalition government, where we've seen housing really collapse, we've seen our healthcare services collapse and we've seen our infrastructure—and by that I mean our foundational industries, like manufacturing and textiles—collapse. It's those three things that I'd like to talk about in this adjournment speech tonight and on this really quite significant day.

On housing, we have really seen an abrogation from coalition governments over the last 30 years, as they completely failed to invest in public housing. I think we saw, over the 10 years that they were in government, something like 373 public social and affordable houses built. That was over those nine years that they were in government. That stands in stark contrast to the more than 200—I think it's something like 206—houses which are being built in one term in one electorate, in the electorate of Forde alone, and those are just the houses which are coming from the Housing Australia Future Fund.

What the government is doing around housing is multipronged. One of them is supply. It's supporting local governments through another $2 billion, taking our total spend to somewhere around $6.3 billion, to support the infrastructure that is needed for new housing. It is in building social and affordable housing. It is in supporting build to rent.

It is also tackling the other equation. We have seen the multiples of wages to house prices increase from somewhere around one to four, which is what it was in 2000 after the Howard government introduced these capital gains tax arrangements in 1999, to one to eight or sometimes one to 10. These tax measures, as we are already starting to see at auctions around the country, have now opened up the market to give first home buyers that edge—to give first home buyers the opportunity to buy that home and not compete against an investor who is using taxpayer funds in their pockets to help boost their bid at an auction.

The other side of the equation, that one-to-four equation, is wages. Because of the federal government continuing to support pay rises through the commission, we've seen just recently a 4.75 per cent increase in wages, which means that the minimum wage has basically increased by more than $12,000 a year. That is not only handy in a cost-of-living crisis; it is also handy when it comes to buying a home.

I think the philosophy of this government is about changing things for the better and not resting on your laurels but continuing to change, like continuing to change in health care, where we saw a complete and utter deterioration of Medicare and bulk-billing over the decade of the previous government because they froze the rebate. A slow and a methodical approach to raising the rebate for pensioners and for children worked to the point where the government was able to then scale it up by providing that tripling of that rebate to everybody who bulk-bills. Again, in just one electorate, we saw the number of bulk-billing clinics more than double over that one night in November when that rebate was tripled. We have seen a concerted attempt to change Australia and to fix the problems that we were left with. Today is a special day, and I mark that accordingly.

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