Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Where to begin? The fact is, whichever way you want to dress it up and whichever way you want to describe it, most young Australians have given up on the dream of owning their own home. It is our desire for young Australians to own their own homes. That's what we have worked towards over many, many periods of government. Our focus isn't on institutional investors. Our focus isn't on superannuation funds. Our focus is, as it absolutely should be, on everyday people, young Australians, who want to own their own homes.

My colleague Senator Antic talked about the fact that young Australians are competing with people from overseas to purchase housing. But they are also now competing with the federal government, with the HAFF purchasing homes as opposed to building them. The government have now purchased more homes than they've built. Why should young Australians be competing with the federal government to buy homes, because they don't know how to build homes? The government's own advice from Treasury has stated that they will not reach the targets they have set for themselves, whilst young Australians continue to struggle not only to buy but to rent. Whilst there was the announcement around opening up the five per cent deposit scheme to everybody—great, but what are they going to buy? Where are the houses that they need to buy? Instead of dealing with those important questions, they continue to point the finger at the opposition. Ultimately, you are in government, and it is up to you to solve that problem.

As we've said over and over, we'll be constructive when we can, but we will absolutely be critical when we see that you have failed to do that. One of those is in relation to the construction code. We took that to the last election. It was bagged by the government—'the shoddy coalition', 'shoddy building', 'shoddy this' and 'shoddy that'. It's highlighted very clearly that the changes that this government made in 2022 to that code have made it harder, made it take longer to build and made it more expensive to build dwellings. Now they're saying that they too will pause changes to the construction code, a code that is some 2,000 pages long. It's three separate volumes. Good luck if you're an Australian small business trying to navigate that.

Question agreed to.