Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What Senator Parry might also find is that this government has ignored five years’ worth of warnings from esteemed organisations like the Reserve Bank about housing affordability and the need to invest in skills and infrastructure to put downward pressure on inflation and interest rates. That is just a fact of life.

We can play the blame game as much as we want but, when there is a fundamental problem, we need some national leadership and a national government that will take action. If the government’s economic management was so rosy and if housing affordability was such a simple issue, why is it that, in 1996, when this government first came to power, people were spending on average 28.7 per cent of their incomes on mortgage loan repayments and yet, in early August this year, only a month ago, average repayments were consuming 32.3 per cent of people’s incomes? It is not only that a greater percentage of household income is being absorbed by the cost of housing. When you also bear in mind that people are actually earning more money these days, on the whole, then that says there is a serious affordability crisis in our community.

It seems we are going to play the game of blaming the states. As I say, that seems to be this government’s only solution or option in discussing this. Whenever we define a problem it is always someone else’s fault. There is never any national leadership to fix this problem for all Australians; instead we are going to blame the states.

In my home state of Western Australia, when the Labor government came to power—and they took over from the Liberal Party, when last I looked—there were only 7½ thousand blocks of land per year released for new homes. Some five years later, there will be over 16½ thousand new blocks of land released for homes, just in the Perth metropolitan area. If that is not the sign of a state government accepting its responsibilities and trying to do its bit to address the need for housing affordability, I do not know what is. Where is the action from the federal government to assist in that, in what is a booming economy? Nowhere. All they can do is just keep blaming others. That is hundreds of percentage points of increase: in five years it has gone up from 7,500 blocks of land released to over 16,500, with the aim to have released 20,000 blocks of land in this financial year. That is a significant contribution to easing the supply of housing. And those opposite then carry on about state government fees and charges.