Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise and speak on housing, which is an issue of critical national importance. I'm proud to say that the Albanese government is the first government in a decade with the gumption to tackle this issue head on. We stand at a crossroads in this nation. Without urgent and decisive action, we risk condemning future generations to being locked out of the housing market. As a young mum from Queensland, I am determined to get this right for those Queenslanders who are struggling right now to get into the housing market, and we must get the policy settings right for future generations. So I agree with Senator Tyrrell when she says that more needs to be done, and it will be done.

The Albanese government is doing more than any government in recent memory. Our ambitious $43 billion Homes for Australia plan includes a commitment to deliver 55,000 social and affordable homes as well as initiatives to make it easier to buy, to make it better to rent and to build more homes. This is the boldest and most ambitious suite of housing initiatives by any government since the Second World War.

I think it's important to detail exactly how Australia got into this mess, which means a quick history lesson. For a long time, Liberal-National governments basically tapped out of taking any responsibility for our housing challenge. Successive conservative governments left it to the states to carry the can for a problem that the lack of federal leadership actually helped to create. So when we ask ourselves the question, 'How the hell did we get here?' the answer is sitting opposite—the Liberal Party and the Nationals. I think most Australians have seen their behaviour for what it is—an abandonment of their duty for the decade they were in government and political opportunism in the now. It was an absolute betrayal of the Australian dream to own a home when they blocked housing legislation in this place with the Greens.

The good news is that now, for the first time, Australia has a government committed to stepping up to the challenge of addressing this housing crisis. Labor is working to clean up this mess after a decade of inaction, scapegoating and excuses from those opposite. I don't say this for petty political point-scoring. I say it because it's important to understand the enormity of the task now in front of us, as a nation, in dealing with a decade of inaction.

I know there is a sense of desperation in the community and a sense of despair about the future because so many hardworking Australians, who are doing everything right to save for a house and being incredibly responsible with the family budget every day, still struggle to buy their own home or find an affordable rental. To those people I say that the Albanese government hears you. We hear the concerns of young people and families, seniors and singles who feel they will never have the chance to own their own home. We hear the concerns of parents who worry they won't be able to give their kids the stability they enjoyed at the same age just a few short decades ago. We hear the concerns of renters whose rents are going up too high and far too often. We hear you, we have acted and we are delivering.

In fact, since our election in 2022, despite the stonewalling of Greens senators and the conservatives in this very building, throughout the last term of government we delivered an impressive number of initiatives to improve housing conditions. We have seen more than 180,000 Australians helped by our government to buy their first home with a five per cent deposit. We have supported more than one million Australian households to pay their rent with our almost 50 per cent increase to rental assistance. We've created a real turnaround in homebuilding, with 500,000 homes built since we came to office. We've got more than 25,000 social and affordable homes in planning or construction, with over 5,000 social and affordable homes completed.

These are all positive numbers and a reason to hold hope for the future, but we are not resting on our laurels. We know we need to keep building. We know we need to make it easier to build, and we know we need to make it quicker to build. Labor is putting the decade of disaster under successive Liberal-National governments behind us. The good news for Senator Tyrrell is that we're already implementing actions to improve the future housing market. In this term of government we're going to build more than one million new homes in the next five years. That's a bold aspiration, but it is our target through the National Housing Accord. Plans are under way to construct 55,000 social and affordable homes—an area of critical need. We're also training more tradies at TAFE to get Aussie workers on the tools with a $10,000 incentive payment to study trades. (Time expired)