Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Economic Reform Round table that we recently had was, at its heart, about addressing the vexed issue of intergenerational inequity. That compact we have between generations has completely broken down. We are aware of that. We hear it every day. We see it every day on the streets of Australia. People are sleeping on our streets—on our footpaths, outside supermarkets—as parents, single mothers with their children, are sleeping in cars, on beaches or in council car parks.

That intergenerational compact has broken down. We see it on the faces of young Australians who have grown up in middle-class homes and done all the right things. They've acquired a skill or trade or gone to university. They've gotten a job. They've worked hard their whole lives. And they feel that they will never own a home. That is what was at the heart of this three-day summit. It was about addressing intergenerational inequity. At the heart of that is housing.

We have a coalition here who has the temerity to shed crocodile tears in this chamber over an issue as significant as housing. We understand the challenge. That's why we have $43 billion on the table for homes for Australia—homes for Australians. Multiple pillars are included in that. There's the Home Guarantee Scheme, which we expanded and tuned up in our first term and which we are now opening up for young Australians so that they can enter the housing market with as little as a five per cent deposit. So acute is this problem that we are accelerating the go-live date. It was going to be 1 January next year; it will now be 1 October.

Already, over 100,000 households have taken up the Home Guarantee Scheme, entering the housing market with as little as a five per cent deposit. In Victoria, that number sits at around 47,000 people—individuals who didn't own a home before we expanded this scheme. And those opposite are criticising us for that. Well, given the level and scale and magnitude of this problem, of course we have to be ambitious. Of course we have to pull every lever, and that is not the only lever that we are pulling.

We brought in the Housing Australia Future Fund, with $10 billion devoted to social and affordable housing. That went live in September of 2024. It could have gone live earlier—maybe a whole year earlier—had the coalition actually passed it in this chamber, in the Senate, but they delayed it. The other scheme that they delayed was the Help to Buy scheme, which enables people on very modest incomes to buy a home with as little as a two per cent deposit, with the government coming in with 30 to 40 per cent equity of that home. It enables them to enter the housing market with a very small deposit and very, very low mortgage repayments. Cleaners would have gotten into the housing market as a result of Help to Buy. Again, that scheme was delayed by the coalition in this chamber. Now they are trying to move another disallowance, this time against build to rent. It's shameful, given the scale of the problem.

Senator Bragg actually said we should have looked up the policies in their LNP policy document. Well, I did. I did look it up in the first term and in the second term, and at the heart of their policy approach to housing is to actually raid your super. Let's drill into that. The median house price in Melbourne is around $900,000. If you need a 20 per cent deposit, it comes out to be about $170,000 to buy a home in Melbourne. In regional Victoria, that number is $572,000, and the 20 per cent deposit is $114,000. The average 30- to 34-year-old man has about $53,000 in his super, and an average woman has about $44,000. It doesn't even touch the sides. It is a fast track to poverty in retirement and homelessness if you raid your super. That was evident not only on the faces of voters in the 2022 election in Higgins, a Liberal blue ribbon seat which I won off the Liberals, but also on the faces of young people at the 2025 election.

So no, we're not going to be taking lectures from the coalition. With respect to the building code, we are not only pausing it but also simplifying it, thereby cutting red tape to enable homes to be built. (Time expired)