Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Housing and Minister for the Status of Women. Will the minister update the House on the impact of the government’s investment in social housing?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Franklin. I was down her way just recently looking at a terrific new housing affordability fund project that will make blocks of land for people to build houses on much more affordable as well as doing a nice bit of urban renewal in an area that really needs it. The government’s Nation Building and Economic Stimulus Plan includes the largest single investment in social housing that has ever been undertaken by an Australian government, and it is part of our efforts to act decisively to build today the infrastructure that we will need for tomorrow while supporting the jobs that we need in the Australian economy. It is obviously working—we have seen the fastest growing economy in the developed world and the second lowest unemployment—but, of course, we are not out of the woods yet, and this investment in social housing is critical to our continued weathering of the storm.

Last week I visited Tasmania to look firsthand at the work that we are doing down there through the investment in social housing. In Launceston I visited the first three homes to be completed under stage 1 of the nation-building social housing element. I met a couple of the families that have moved into those houses, and I was also able to hear about the builders and tradespeople that were employed on those jobs—10 tradespeople were employed at varying times on that project—and the work for local businesses and contractors. I was also able to announce that, for stage 2 of the social housing stimulus package, we would be working with Tasmania to build 445 new homes in Tasmania for $109 million, supporting small businesses and jobs in Tasmania.

I was also able to look at the repair and maintenance work that is being done there. I visited a quite old building of about 62 units, built around the 1960s, in New Town in Hobart. These were tiny little units, probably not much bigger than this table here. While I was visiting these units, which had become so run down that a number of the units were not livable, I met a man called Alex Lidster who is 91 years old. He told me that the work that was being done to upgrade his unit had completely changed his life, and he said that this accommodation was so necessary to him. He told the newspaper down there, the Mercury:

Without it I would probably be homeless, so it is very important to me.

That was a 91-year-old Tasmanian talking about the effect of this work on his quality of life. Spotless, the contractor overseeing the project, were employing 48 tradespeople and 10 apprentices to do the work that they had got through the social housing stimulus package—48 tradespeople and 10 apprentices. So the repairs and maintenance that Spotless were doing and the other work that is being done around Tasmania have been absolutely critical to keeping those jobs in the construction sector.

If you look around the country at the repairs and maintenance alone, we expected to fix up 2½ thousand homes—to bring them back from the scrap heap, essentially. Instead we will fix up about 10,600 homes. We will do major work on homes that are already uninhabitable or would have been lost to public housing stock. We will do work, altogether, on about 60,000 homes. What is particularly interesting about this is that about 35,000 homes have already had work done on them and about 15,000 homes have benefited from work being done in common areas. So those small jobs and larger jobs around the country have been supporting employment for many months now in all parts of the country where there is social housing. I was lucky enough to visit the site—in Hobart as well—of a new homelessness facility that will be built in Campbell Street and will house 50 people. It is one of the 40 new specialist homelessness facilities that we will build around the country as part of our efforts through social housing and through our homelessness spending.

It is worth remembering, of course, that the opposition have not supported any of this at any stage. They have not supported the stimulus spending, they have not supported the repairs and maintenance, they have not supported the new building, they have not supported the housing for vulnerable Australians and they have not supported the jobs that have come from this work. It is our policy instead to support this housing for vulnerable Australians but also to support those jobs for tradies, for builders, for electricians, for plumbers, for carpenters, for tilers, for manufacturers of building equipment and for all of their apprentices right around the country.