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

Thank you, Speaker. I'm just talking about the fantastic new homeownership pathways that have been opened up by our government, and I've spoken about some of the numbers that are relevant to this question. But of course you don't actually need to take my word for it. We all read the newspapers of a Sunday morning, and for the first time in my life they are peppered with article after article about first home buyers around the country who are going to auctions and winning. And it's not rocket science. There's a very simple reason they're winning auctions. For the first time in 25 years, first home buyers are standing on a level playing field.

And I want to remind the public that, up until this point, those opposite have engineered a system where the young people of this country have been paying taxes to subsidise the investor next to them to outbid them at auctions every Saturday. We have bought that system to an end, and we are damn proud to have done it.

I want to talk about a recent sale, in the electorate of Fraser, of a house in Footscray that sold for $817,000. The real estate agent said there was 'a bit of emotion' when the vendors and the buyers met post-auction, as the vendors had bought that as their first home, and they were handing it to a young couple who were after their first home. And in the electorate of the fantastic member for Wills, a three-bedroom townhouse on a converted squash court sold in post-auction negotiations for $810,000 to a first home buyer. The real estate agent said: 'A lot of first home buyers walked through this one. There are a lot of buyers around that are first home buyers. They are the ones that are still moving in a timely manner.'

We're on the side of first home buyers, and I think we can see from those opposite that they are the last man standing, defending the broken housing market in this country. We're making the real change that Australians are asking for on housing.

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