Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really glad we've got a bunch of students in the gallery today watching us, because what they're seeing here today is a lesson on what it looks like to see the simmering and bubbling start of a scare campaign. This is what it looks like. This is where the scare campaigns start: right here in the Senate, so you're getting a good little lesson about where scare campaigns start.

The scare campaign that's here today is about the tax on your spare bedroom—untrue—and proposing it as something that's our idea when actually it is not our idea. It wasn't mentioned once at the roundtable, not once, and they should know. Their shadow Treasurer was there, hopefully he was taking some notes. He would have noticed that not once was the spare bedroom tax mentioned—zero, zilch.

But it's really not surprising from those opposite to be serving red meat in this chamber to their base, because that is what they do. They serve red meat to their base. They certainly don't serve the Australian community. That's what we've been doing every day since we've been elected to this place.

I want to talk about a couple of things. One is that I wonder if those opposite have thought about what you need to be able to have a spare bedroom tax—a home maybe. You need a house. What we've been doing is building more homes for Australians. That's what we've been doing. You would've heard Minister Clare O'Neil after the roundtable announce that we're taking immediate action to cut red tape, by pausing and streamlining the National Construction Code and speeding up approvals by clearing the backlog of 26,000 homes waiting for federal environment approval.

On this side, we see housing as one of the defining challenges of our economy. We don't see it as an opportunity to run a scare campaign. We're getting to work, addressing those challenges every day. The way that we've done it on this side is setting ambitious targets. We're working hard across multiple fronts to meet them, and backing that effort with $43 billion in new investment to increase supply and help more people into their first homes. That's what we've been doing on this side. The investments that we've made and the policy focus we've put onto housing are delivering results.

More than 500,000 homes have been built since we were elected. We're also seeing the construction sector gain momentum. Building approvals are up almost 30 per cent since a year ago. Cost growth in construction was below one per cent over the past year. Dwelling commencements are up 14 per cent in annual terms. Dwelling investment is growing at more than five per cent, driven by higher investment in new builds. We know there's more to do. It'll be difficult, and we've said that repeatedly for some time. We're not shying away from the challenge that faces our country right now around housing. But we owe it to Australians to try—and we'd be much more advanced if those opposite, our predecessors, took the housing challenge seriously.

We're also helping more people get into their own home. We're unequivocally and unashamedly on the side of people trying to get into a home of their own. To get more Australians into their first home, the government must both increase supply and give people support to buy; both those things are linked. We've seen where demand-only housing policy gets us. It delivers nothing but worsening affordability for renters and falling homeownership; that is the dark ages of housing policy and nine years of coalition incompetence. There is plenty more to say about that.

As I said, we've delivered 500,000 homes. We're delivering 55,000 social and affordable homes, and building 100,000 homes exclusively for first home buyers. It's why we were given a mandate to continue our work to make the housing market work for all Australians. We were elected with a mandate for the Australian people, to get them into their first homes and to build more homes. That's exactly what we've done every single day.