Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the minister for housing. How will the government's housing agenda support social and affordable housing to help reduce the cost of living?

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

I thank the member for Boothby for the question and also note her very long interest in housing and housing affordability. Indeed, we know that today's decision of the Reserve Bank will make it more difficult for more Australians to find a safe and affordable place to call home. We also know that many families around Australia, after this decision today, will be making very tough decisions about their mortgage repayments, but also around their family budgets, with the cost of other essentials also going up.

Of course, we inherited rising inflation, rising interest rates and a trillion dollars of debt from the other side. That's why we went to the election with a very substantial plan to deal with housing and housing affordability.

Indeed, in the lead-up to the Jobs and Skills Summit, in every round table that I held—and I know this also from talking to others on our side of the place—the cost of housing was raised as a really critical issue to getting staff. It was getting really, really critical for those employers to get staff because of a lack of affordable housing in their regions particularly. That's why we took a decision to unlock up to $575 million from the National Housing Infrastructure Facility. This facility has been underutilised. We want to work with the other tiers of government, like social housing providers, but also to try and unlock private capital, such as superannuation investment, into more social and affordable housing across the country.

We also have a broader plan that includes the Housing Australia Future Fund, where we want to build 30,000 more social and affordable houses right across the country. We also have programs that we're going to be introducing to help more Australians purchase a private home. We have the Help To Buy Scheme, which is a government equity scheme, and the Regional First Home Buyer Support Scheme to help more people living in regional Australia to get into their first home. Then we want to introduce the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. That's because we know that going forward we're going to need to be able to work together on this and have some answers on affordability and supply. And there's the national housing and homelessness plan. We've worked with the states, local government, social housing providers and, importantly, the construction industry and the building sector to have a long-term plan to ensure that we're not in this position again. We want a plan to make sure that housing is affordable over the long term.

The Jobs and Skills Summit highlighted this government's collaborative approach. It's by working together that we will be able to address these housing challenges. I've already met with my state counterparts. We had the first housing ministers' meeting in almost five years in May, and we're having another meeting at the end of this week, to talk about the national plan and to get things happening because we want to get as many houses on the ground as quickly as possible.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! There's far too much noise. There's far too much noise from the member for Barker, the member for O'Connor and the member for Longman.