Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Speaker, I extend my congratulations to you for your continuing service in this important role.

The results of the last federal election said something about the kind of nation we are, and we have seen it in parliament this week. On Tuesday we saw new MPs being sworn in on Bibles, on Korans and on the Bhagavad Gita. We saw gender equality in the members and the senators sitting on the government benches during the Governor-General's address, and in members' first speeches we've heard beautiful stories encompassing the glorious diversity of modern Australia.

At the last election, the Australian public chose a government that reflects and represents modern Australia, a diverse nation united by common values and aspirations, a nation that doesn't always agree but still comes together around the bigger things that unite us as Australians, a nation that defines itself not by our differences but by what we have in common. It is what the Prime Minister called a 'progressive patriotism'. The Australian voters voted for this at the last election, but they also voted to reject those politicians who practice the politics of division. They rejected politicians who sought to advance their own partisan interests by dividing the Australian community.

The world has thrown a lot of challenges at Australia over the last three years. Australians have been traumatised by direct connections to international conflicts, and some Australians have disagreed strongly about how the world and Australia should respond to these conflicts. It's challenged the cohesion of our diverse Australian community. I've said before that cohesion is a verb, not a noun. It means the action of forming a united hole. It's an ongoing process, not an end state. Preserving our cohesion as a nation requires a continuing work, and Australian multiculturalism works best when we work at it. This means engaging with each other in good faith; understanding that our fellow Australians will sometimes see things differently than we do and listening to each other with empathy and curiosity about this rather than judgement; trying to understand where other Australians are coming from and why they think, feel and act in the way they do; and using that understanding to find common ground. Unfortunately, in the last parliament, some in this place chose to exploit the challenges we faced, demonising some groups and seeking to divide the Australian community for political gain. The Australian public rejected this at the last election, and many of the most enthusiastic practitioners of this kind of politics are no longer with us in this chamber as a result.

But there are lessons for those who remain and for their parties. For the Greens, the lesson is that you can't build a political movement condemning everyone who disagrees with you. You can't build a political movement based on the premise that everyone who disagrees with you is either financially corrupt or morally evil. Unsurprisingly, this approach to politics doesn't persuade anyone who didn't already agree with you beforehand, and it makes it impossible to build a big enough coalition to actually deliver anything on the issues you care about. Speaking of coalitions, there are lessons for the LNP from the last election too. From labelling Chinese Australians participating in our democracy as Chinese spies to actively preferencing Pauline Hanson's One Nation party, it sometimes felt like the Liberal-National coalition were deliberately trying to alienate every segment of modern Australia.

But tonight I want to highlight one specific trend on the right of politics that has attracted less attention and needs to be addressed. It's not a reflection of the broader Australian community but a narrow part of right-wing politics. In far-right circles around the world, there's now an emerging trend to specifically single out Indian diaspora communities in anti-immigration rhetoric. Media reports have noted a significant increase in overtly racist AI generated material targeting Indian Australian communities on social media platforms like TikTok.

Former Liberal National MP George Christensen has even nonsensically alleged that the Albanese government rigged the last election in slow motion by flooding Australia with Indian migrants. George is an irrelevant nobody, but this kind of singling-out of Indian migrants over other groups has more recently been taken up by Advance, a group that has actively campaigned for Liberal-National coalition candidates. Advance recently published an anti-immigration video that explicitly singled out Indian and Chinese migrants as hurting Australia by sending remittances to their families. The video even included a photo of the Prime Minister wearing a turban—an act of respect at a Sikh event. What are they trying to achieve by sharing a picture of the Prime Minister wearing a turban in an anti-immigration video? And why did they not use a picture of any other group referenced in that report?

The new Leader of the Opposition says that she wants the Liberal Party to reflect and represent modern Australia, and I'm glad to hear it. All of us in this chamber should work together in this cause. I welcome the Liberal Party joining this mission. A good contribution the new opposition leader could make is taking on this emerging trend of singling out Indian diaspora communities in anti-immigration rhetoric on the right. She should nip it in the bud now in the interest of a modern Australia.

Cameron Caldwell (Fadden, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If housing were a game of hide-and-seek, Labor would be world champions, because no-one can seem to find the houses that they promised would be built. We were told Labor had a plan, a so-called ambitious target of 1.2 million homes over five years. But ambition without ability is, quite simply, fantasy. According to the Property Council of Australia and as now validated by Treasury, Labor is on track to miss this target by a staggering 400,000 homes. That's not a small error; that's the equivalent of forgetting to house the entire city of Canberra twice over.

Let's be clear: the core of this crisis is not the weather or the war in Ukraine or some mysterious supply chain ghost; the core of this crisis is Labor's catastrophic mismanagement of the policy levers that drive housing supply. They talk a big game about the Housing Australia Future Fund. The $10 billion allocation was proudly announced with much fanfare. But, two years on, that fund has delivered a grand total of 17 homes. That's right—17 homes. To put it in context, that's one home for every 43 days since the fund was announced.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister continues to ramble on about solutions, but he has quietly relocated his once-beloved Minister for Housing and Homelessness. She used to sit around about there, just behind the Prime Minister, but now she's been shuffled so far down the front bench she might as well be out in the cark park. She's now further from the Prime Minister than the member for Sydney. In Labor terms, that is really saying something. And yet, she remains the public face of a housing policy that's so hollow not even termites will move in.

Make no mistake: this is policy failure and economic failure. Labor has utterly failed to provide the conditions for housing construction across all sectors. The private market, the not-for-profit sector and even state governments are hamstrung by policy paralysis here in Canberra. Builders are crying out for certainty, local governments are asking for coordination, and families are desperate for a roof over their heads. And what they're getting from this is delay, dysfunction and dishonesty.

And it gets worse. Labor's immigration settings are running at full tilt. Net overseas migration topped 500,000 last year, but housing completions are dropping. There's now a yawning mismatch between migration and housing supply. Labor is bringing in more people than we are building homes. It's a basic economic imbalance that puts upward pressure on prices, inflates rents and prices Australians out of the market. Where's the plan to align migration, infrastructure and housing?

Now, let's talk renters. Labor said they would act on rents. They said they would take pressure of families. But, under their watch, rents have skyrocketed up to 30 per cent in some parts of this country. Their only solution? More red tape, more talking points and more false hope. Even social housing, their so-called priority, has stagnated. Labor's approach seems to be to announce the money, pocket the headline and then walk away from responsibility.

This is a government that can't get the foundations right, literally. They cannot and will not construct housing. The real failure is not providing the settings for others to do so. Their policies are confused, their coordination is non-existent, and they're credibility is going, going, gone. I wonder if the minister will now concede that it's time to stop using the word 'ambitious' and replace it with 'unachievable', 'delusional' or 'misguided'. The Australian people deserve better than spin in place of shelter. They deserve a government that can match population growth with infrastructure, that can enable builders not bury them and that can enable the private sector to get on with doing what they do—building houses, roads, shopping centres and playgrounds. Labor has had three years to show leadership on housing, and all they can show is failure. They can't build homes. They can't manage supply. They can't fix the crisis. But what they have built is an almighty housing mess.