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

I'll take that contribution. It was a suggestion by the coalition, but we're improving on that, which is worth doing. I'll also note that the Home Guarantee Scheme was a coalition legacy. What we did in our first term of government was expand the eligibility of that scheme and tune it up. What we found was that it was wildly successful. Over 100,000 households took up the modifications that we made. And so we have now gone further. We have gone further by opening it up further to first home buyers irrespective of their income, and that has garnered so much interest that the website crashed yesterday. The website crashed.

So I think it is genuinely perplexing, given the scale of the problem—and we see it every day on our streets in Australia. We see it on the footpaths, people sleeping on our footpaths, even in wealthy electorates, like mine, as it was, Higgins. There it was. I also knew that families were living in cars in council car parks in Higgins—in Higgins, one of the wealthiest electorates in Australia. If it's bad there, imagine what it's like elsewhere. We have not just people living in tents; we now have people living in tent cities. There are around 122,000 Australians who are homeless every night, based on data from a census four years ago. We think that number is much worse now. Back then, around 8,000 people slept rough, including around 200 children under the age of 12. Those numbers may well be worse now.

This is an emergency. Start treating it like an emergency, Liberals and Nationals, and stop blocking our housing agenda. This is an emergency. You don't do one thing; you do everything. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the outcome. The outcome is more homes for Australia and more homes for Australians.