Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are facing a big issue, a housing affordability crisis. Australia is home to the second most expensive housing market in the English-speaking world. The dream of owning a home has become just that: a dream. It was a dream I had and worked really hard to achieve, and it took me a long time. I was fortunate enough, though, to be born at a time when things were a little bit easier. What I hear from many Tasmanians, younger Australians, is that they are living pay to pay. Saving for a house isn't on the table. All the while, housing prices continue to rise beyond the reach of new home entrance.

The RBA can't make housing more affordable, realistically. It can make the funds to buy a house cheaper but, when it does, they get cheaper for everybody, first-home buyers and investors alike. Realistically, the only path to more-affordable housing is the government, not The Reserve Bank. That's why the fact that the government is doing so little is so embarrassing. The Labor government says they are acting—and they're good at it, too. They throw money at first-home owner schemes and start up the Housing Australia Future Fund—then, pens down.

It's fair to acknowledge that generally crossbench politicians tend to criticise from the sidelines, complaining how bad everything is and never offering solutions. But that's just not me. I want to help fix things. So here are a few things we could do right now. The government could hire an architect to produce free floor plans for a series of low-cost housing designs, using off-the-shelf components wherever possible and for use in a wide range of communities. The federal government could pay councils who agree to use approved plans in a streamlined application process—a per-approval bonus. Councils would be held accountable and have to explain to ratepayers for failing to approve these applications. Councils already face pressures to vote down development applications from NIMBY advocates.

The government's target is 1.2 million new homes over five years. If 10 per cent of those were from this blueprint, it would fast-track 24,000 brand new homes and cost the federal government $480 million a year. To put that number into context, the Housing Australia Future Fund made $750 million last year and has supported 13,800 homes. Keep these approvals simple and subsequently reduce the cost of building. Mass manufacturing common components to a similar mould would make things cheaper. The cost of a bathtub moulding is the same whether you're making one or one million. The more you make, the lower the costs. And ultra-affordable building design could allow for economies of scale that would bring down prices on builds, which is impossible to match by relying on the private sector alone. This policy could increase the supply of cheaper homes on a faster timeline with less cost to the taxpayer while creating a bunch of jobs.

Look, putting more money into the hands of buyers is not a long-term solution. Every dollar you give a buyer is a dollar that gets spent at an auction. Labor is timidly following in the footsteps of the Liberal government that came before it, in thinking about housing as which side of the face you'd like to be punched in. Is it better to cheapen the single biggest investment the majority of Australians will ever make or to drive up the value of those investments, causing the remainder to fall further and further behind? For 25 years, both chose the latter. In that time, house values have outgrown wages at double the rate.

If you create a new sector within the housing market, you don't have to choose between driving down prices or driving up prices. The price of airfares between Sydney and Melbourne isn't impacted by the price of airfares between Darwin and Adelaide. One isn't competing with the other. You create a new sector which is not competing with the rest of the market. You make the cake and can eat it too. This isn't the only thing we should do or the only thing we can do.

An option that has not been discussed, an option worth exploring, is that right now it takes too long to build a house. It costs too much and we're not doing it enough. That's where the problem is—supply, supply, supply—yet we're throwing money at demand for housing, as though the way to fix a bubble is by blowing bigger bubbles and adding more suds. If building more is what we want, we can start by building in the right direction. Simply spending more won't get us far.