Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a question time that was. We had a question on superannuation from the party who wants young Australians to drain their superannuation in order to get into housing. We had a question on housing, again, from the party who voted against our government's entire housing agenda in cahoots with the Greens. We had a question on the application of fiscal rules from the party who repeatedly fail to follow their own in government. And we had a question on tax from the party who took higher income taxes to the last election as their policy and then were shocked when the Australian people rejected it. What a way to set the agenda in question time. But let's go to housing.

I am deeply proud of our government's housing agenda. As I said, whilst those opposite think the way to solve the housing crisis is to tell young Australians that they cannot both have a meaningful retirement through superannuation and own a home, their policy is—and has been for a number of years—to get young Australians to rip out their super to pay for housing. We have a higher ambition for young Australians. We believe young Australians deserve to have both.

We know that, in Australia, it is simply too hard for too many people to get into a home. This isn't just an issue for young Australians—although it affects young Australians most acutely—who are seeing a completely different intergenerational deal being offered to them than what was offered to the generations beforehand. We've got an opposition party who is coming up with policies which will continue to undermine that and which will continue to affect and alter that intergenerational bargaining by saying, 'You can use your superannuation to buy housing.' What about your retirement? Why can you not have both? We need to have a better ambition for young Australians and a better deal for them.

The fact is, when it comes to our housing market, this is a problem fundamentally of supply. For the past three years in government we have pulled every lever we can to try to increase supply of houses into the market. And the fact is: every single time we walked into this place with a proposal to increase supply and a bill which would increase the number of houses available to Australians, which would help Australians get into the housing market, what did those opposite do? They voted against it. They joined up in the 'noalition' across the benches in this place to vote against a housing agenda which would have made a difference to supply and to young Australians.

But we know the work of our last term of government is not everything. There is still so much more we can do and are doing. We are putting every single idea on the table to unlock more houses into the market to help Australians buy a home because we understand fundamentally what that means to young Australians and what that intergenerational bargain should be. It shouldn't be the case that your parents and your grandparents got to enjoy a different standard of living and a higher standard of living than you could ever hope to as a working Australian. That shouldn't be the case for young people in Australia.

Yes, we held our economic round table, the principle being to bring the best ideas to the table because we are a government that listens, that consults and which thinks we are better when we have more evidence, more facts and more substance to the policy narratives and discussions we are having in this country. We think that makes us a better government, makes our ministers better and makes our policies better, and that means we can deliver more for the Australian people. That's what our round table was about. We will continue to prosecute an agenda on housing focused on the key fundamental challenge before us; that is, supply. We will do it because we are a government fundamentally focused on the founding principle, of all of us as Labor people, of fairness and intergenerational equity. We know that is not the case in Australia at the moment.

Question time today was about trying to undermine a process which would lead to better policy outcomes in Australia. It was about gotcha questions on an agenda which we are running with and the opposition has failed to support for three years—an opposition which would rather see our government fail on delivering more housing to Australians and rather see our government fail on building a strong economy than see Australians benefit from all those things. They are so self-focused on themselves that they would rather us fail. That's not our approach. We're about bringing in the best ideas to create the best policies to be the best government we can be for the generations of Australians to come.