Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is the great dream of every Australian to own their own home, and this is so crucially important. Having a roof over your head and owning it yourself has to be the aspiration of Australians, particularly those who are working, paying taxes and having aspirations, but it's becoming more and more difficult.

It was really interesting to read in the Australian yesterday the piece by the highly respected Robert Gottliebsen, headed 'Government charges pushing new home costs above market value'. He gave the government some credit in the introductory sentence:

The Albanese government's first-home buyers scheme will help a lot of younger Australian gain a dwelling, and it's a good first step, but it does not address the fundamental problem.

He is so right. He continued:

In many areas of the dwelling market the cost of building, fuelled by government taxes plus construction costs, has risen to a point where, on a bricks-and-mortar comparison, it is cheaper to buy an existing dwelling than to build a new one.

And I appreciate that. But there's also the fact that so many construction companies are going to the wall—pardon the pun. They truly are. They can't build a wall because they're going bankrupt. Indeed, it is becoming more and more difficult. The demolition—again, pardon the pun—of the Australian Building and Construction Commission in the first term of this government took away the regular cop on the beat as far as construction working sites go. Then, as Robert Gottliebsen said in his article, we've got, particularly in apartments, 'a militant union movement' adding 'cost uncertainty, particularly in Brisbane.' He talked about the 'gap between market values and building costs' making banks 'nervous about lending.'

Then consider the Daily Telegraph report, back on 31 July:

Construction firms are falling like dominoes with insolvencies almost tripling—

tripling!—

in a decade, casting considerable doubt over NSW's—

my home state's—

plan to build hundreds of thousands of new homes.

In fact, the figure is 377,000 new homes—that's the plan—by 2029 under the National Housing Accord. Then consider the number of construction companies that are failing, the number of construction companies going into liquidation. In the 2024-25 financial year, this increased to a historic high of 1,567, up from 611 in 2014-15. That data comes from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. Industry leaders are very worried. It's all well and good for Labor to come in here and talk about the Housing Australia investment mandate amendment. It's all well and good for them to crow about the fact that Labor's building 1.2 million homes. That's the plan. Well, I've said it many times, good luck with that. And I do genuinely mean good luck with that, because with construction companies failing by the numbers that I mentioned it is going to be so difficult.

What Labor needs to do is reduce compliance on business. It is crucial that the government does this. We've already seen nearly 30,000 small businesses go into bankruptcy under this government. Many of them are in the construction space. It is so hard. I know Labor are talking up the importance of tertiary education—and, yes, it's fine to have a university education—and then they go on about free TAFE—and that's a misnomer too—but what about the relief, help for tradies, sparkies, chippies and brickies? It's just not there.

If Labor wants to do something in the housing space, it needs to address, much better, the cost-of-living pressures on so many Australians and so many Australian families, those Australians who once had the idea, the dream, the aspiration of owning their own home, which is off into the never, never. It's almost becoming an impossible dream. We've got buyers agent Diane Klem-Goode describing the current housing market as 'limited' and 'madness'—and it is. It truly is, and Labor is doing very little about it. This is just a folly.

Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Talking about madness from the member for Riverina! We are working on the cost of living, and one of the things that we can do to help households is help with their wages. The coalition's policy in the last government was to keep wages deliberately low. That's unacceptable and that's not what Australians want. They want to earn more and keep more of what they earn so they can get into the housing market. Labor has been putting on the table everything that it can to make sure that we are making differences to the lives of everyday Australians, and it is clear that that was shown at the ballot box on election day earlier this year. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak on this motion and welcome our policy of a five per cent deposit for all first home buyers. It adds to a list of proud achievements that Labor has been working on. This includes the Housing Australia Future Fund, $10 billion to ensure that we have a steady stream of social and affordable housing. We will not waste a decade like the coalition did.

We also have the National Housing Accord. This is a plan for bringing all state and territory governments together to make sure that we have a vision for the housing supply that we need. That will be 1.2 million homes by 2030, but, as a part of that, we also committed $350 billion to build 10,000 homes. We also have the Help to Buy scheme, worth $6.3 billion. We're backing home buyers with shared equity. We have the Social Housing Accelerator, with another $2 billion to help refurbish homes and provide new homes to the states and territories. We even have a crisis and transitional accommodation fund, which is $100 million for women and children experiencing family and domestic violence and also older women at risk of homelessness, which is one of the fastest-growing groups that we have within our communities that are experiencing homelessness.

I also have to commend the Minister for Housing, because we are a government that not only makes commitments and sets out timeframes; we also sometimes overdeliver. And so, rather than this scheme of a five per cent deposit starting on 1 January, we have brought it forward to 1 October. We are doing that because we want to get people into their own home sooner. This is what we do when we have a keen and active cabinet that is working on the problems of everyday Australians. Over 180,000 first home buyers have already benefited from our five per cent deposit scheme. One million households received a nearly 50 per cent increase in rent assistance. Five hundred thousand homes have been built since we came into office, and 28,000 social and affordable homes are in planning or construction.

This new rule basically means that you don't have to save up a 20 per cent deposit, which can take such a long time. We uncapped the scheme so that this can be something that's available for all first home buyers. For single parents, we are continuing the Family Home Guarantee, which will help them buy a home with as little as two per cent. It reminds me of my dear friend whom I studied with at Murdoch University. We were studying community development, and she was living in social housing and was working hard to provide for her family, her daughter. The sense of having a secure roof over her head was important. She graduated from university, got an excellent job with her new masters degree and was so excited to have the opportunity to have housing—a permanent roof over her family's heads—for the rest of their lives. This is what Labor governments do, right?

But let's think about it. If we think about the opposition's time in power, we know there was a total neglect of social and affordable housing. There was no national coordination or leadership. There was a wasted decade of reform on planning and regulation. There was contempt of renters and a failure to act in the middle of a rental crisis. There was a wasted decade of potential federal action on housing. It's kind of funny because there was also a period of time where there was no housing minister, which I think is quite extraordinary. I'm surprised that Scott Morrison didn't declare himself the secret minister for housing as well. This is probably our No. 1 issue. It would actually have been useful, but he didn't clock that. So we inherited a mess.

The thing that I'd say is that we're working systematically on this. Some of these policies will take time to implement, and there will be a time lag because it takes time to build houses. But we're even working on how quickly we can build houses, from fast-tracking trade skills that we need to making fee-free TAFE legislated for ever. We are doing everything that we can. It's interesting, because the coalition in their time neglected social and affordable housing because they did not value it. They did not value people having a roof over their head. They built fewer than 400 homes while in government, and they promised to cut our investments if elected.

They attacked the Housing Australia Future Fund, forming a 'no-alition' with the Greens which would have meant a $10 billion fund locking in social housing for the long term could not be implemented. Then, after delaying it for months, and with their latest talking points saying that it wasn't moving fast enough, they attacked the National Housing Accord—a milestone for federal leadership and a collaboration with the states. This is what Labor governments do. We work with others, and the productivity roundtable showed that as well. The coalition delayed the Help to Buy scheme, accusing us of wanting to own other people's homes—never mind the real people living in their own homes right now liking it. They committed to cutting the $2 billion Social Housing Accelerator, which saw us coordinating the injection funds straight to the states. The Liberal government wasted a decade with no planning and regulation reform, and that's quite sad.

Out of our summit that we held the week before parliament, we had agreement across sectors and committed actions on starting real planning reforms, building environmental regulations that are fit-for-purpose and freezing the building code. This is something that we're doing because we know that it is really important that we get as many homes built as quickly as possible. The Liberal contempt for housing is as old as the Howard years. It's the same thing as before, and it's clear today. It made for a great question time moment where there was an exchange between John Howard, the radio presenter and a caller named Phyllis. The presenter said:

You've said no-one's complained to you about the rising increase in the value of their home, let me be the first to complain—people like myself are actually being forced to face the possibility that we may be renting for the rest of our lives because getting into …

The Prime Minister said:

Do you own a home?

The presenter then said:

No, I rent.

The Prime Minister then said:

No, well I'm sorry, I was talking about people who owned a home. I did, to be fair Steve, I did make that point. I said I haven't found anybody who owns a home complaining to me that the value of it has gone up.

Phyllis then called in, showing her sense of intergenerational fairness, and she said:

…We're on a pension and we would like to sell our homes, go into a unit or a townhouse or something. But we can't do that because if we do, we're going to spend the whole amount just on a townhouse or a unit and we'll have nothing left over if we need to do anything to it. So we're stuck.

The Prime Minister said:

Look Phyllis, what I said was that not everybody was sitting on a nest egg. I said people had not complained about the value of their house going up.

…   …   …

Well you're not … you're not actually complaining. What you're really saying is the value of a house hasn't gone up enough.

Phyllis said:

No, no, no. I disagree. I think that it is ridiculous that the inflation of the housing prices … what about our grandchildren?

The Prime Minister then said:

Well look, that is a valid point and I've acknowledged that. I'm not saying that there aren't problems for people buying for the first time, but you have to look at it in terms of both existing homeowners and future homeowners and what we have to try and do, and you quite rightly identify in relation to your grandchildren, is to find ways of mitigating the cost of getting into your first home.

Well, former prime minister John Howard, we are onto it. This new scheme is a way of getting new first home buyers into their home sooner, faster, better.