Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd just like to convey, for having received the lovely feedback from Senator Sterle about me being a very decent human being—it's very true, by the way; I am—that back. You're on the wrong side of the chamber, I reckon. I don't know what you're doing over there mixing with the socialists. You should be over with the good guys, where you belong, because I think you're alright too. That's a lovely moment for the Australian people. But we are here to talk about more important matters than my love for Senator Sterle. We are here to talk about the important matters that were raised by the coalition senators on this side this afternoon.

One of them was a very good question, from Senator Bragg, who asked the minister about the housing crisis. By the way, it's not a storm on the horizon. It's here right now today, and Australians are feeling the pinch of that crisis. Of course, if it were true that those opposite were actually speaking to real Australians, they would understand that in the way that we understand it. Every time I talk to an Australian, be they young or old, they tell me the same thing is on their mind, and that is the state of housing in this country. The minister glossed over the response, I think, to the question. The question was what was driving this. The answer to that is multifactorial. The main one, of course, is the state of the economy generally. We've seen Labor promising working families in this country for a long period of time now a better life, but they're delivering weaker growth, higher energy costs and falling living standards. Household growth in itself is going backwards at a rate of knots, and productivity has flatlined. In fact we know, because we on this side of the chamber have said it until we're blue in the face that Australia's plunged from 13th to 18th in global competitiveness over the last few years. Prices across the board are skyrocketing, and that is affecting the housing market more than anything at all. We've heard them campaigning against this National Construction Code, and now they tell us that they themselves want to freeze the National Construction Code. They really don't understand the nexus and genesis of what's happening. But we have to understand that there is an elephant in the room when it comes to the housing crisis—that is, the mass migration crisis that we're seeing in this country and that we have seen over the last few years.

The financial year 2023-24 saw net overseas migration at around 446,000 new people coming into this country. The previous year was just over half a million—536,000—people coming into this country. That's just over a million people that have entered this country over the last couple of years. Australians are now competing with people from overseas every single day to afford affordable homes to either rent or buy. It's not only the housing market which is under threat; it's also our transport system, our health care and our schools. The fact is that immigration should be doing something for Australia rather than the other way around.

I would suggest that the current model of mass migration is not serving the interests of the Australian people any longer; in fact, it is now doing quite the opposite. The number of times young Australians have talked to me about turning up to rental inspections and being there with 50 to 100 other people—all waiting in line and all looking for their opportunity to rent a property—is the overarching factor over and above the competition and the state of the economy. I know that, at the last two elections, I didn't hear that discussed by the government; I didn't hear this plan to continue to allow huge numbers of people through the gates. I certainly didn't vote for anything of that nature with that in mind, and there are no Australians that I'm aware of that did that either.

This policy is, frankly, tearing at the fabric of this country. It is taking away from Australians what they have an absolute right to expect. We heard, over the election period, Morgan Cox get on Q+A on the ABC and talk about this very issue only for 'how dare he' to be howled at him. This is a man with a young family and a wife—who was born overseas, I think—so hardly the caricature of a person that they like to cast in this. Talk about this very issue, how it's affecting Australians and what it is doing to the very fabric of this nation. That is the overriding issue on the housing crisis, I would suggest.