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

Instead of choosing to do something about this problem, they so vacated the field that they chose, for the majority of their nine years in government, to not even bother having a Commonwealth housing minister. I want to remind the parliament of how many social and affordable homes they built around our country in that time, in nine long years. It was 373. That is a national outrage. We've got people across that side of the parliament who think that they speak for regional Australia. They chose to build not a single social and affordable home across the entirety of regional and rural Australia.

We take a different view. We see the pain this is causing in the lives not just of the people that we represent but of the people that those opposite us represent. That's why we're standing up and acting. We are pulling every lever that the Commonwealth has available to it. And I say again to those opposite: the leadership of the member for Hume is going to be inauspicious and short, I can see that. Let's hope that the leader that follows him takes a different approach to the matter of housing.

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