Richard Dowling (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I don't think anybody denies there's a housing crisis in this country and we need to be extremely focused on addressing housing affordability. It's real, it's serious, and it's hurting Australians. But slogans don't build homes, and all this motion is is a slogan, not supply. The housing crisis wasn't created overnight. It was a generation in the making, driven by a decade of underbuilding, underinvestment and a Commonwealth that walked away from housing altogether. We just heard the Liberal spokesman claim that this government is doing nothing. How about having no housing minister? That is doing nothing. There's no focus at all.

The critical point missing from this motion is supply, not tweaking the tax code. If you don't build enough homes, prices go up. That is basic economics. I think everyone should understand and appreciate that, in the housing crisis, the No. 1 fundamental thing we cannot be distracted from is increasing supply. Tax settings matter at the margins, but supply determines outcomes at scale. Right now, Australia has a housing supply gap that measures in the hundreds of thousands of homes, and that gap was created long before this government took office.

Instead of press releases and protest politics, Labor is doing the hard work of rebuilding Australia's housing system. It's a $45 billion agenda, the most ambitious since World War II. It's more than eight times the coalition's investment when they were in office. There are 55,000 social and affordable homes underway as part of the $10 billion HAFF, 100,000 homes reserved exclusively for first home buyers under the Help to Buy scheme and a national ambition to deliver 1.2 million new homes, working with states, councils and industry. The latest data coming out of the ABS showed that the total number of dwellings approved in the last calendar year was up to 195,730, a 12.8 per cent increase since 2024. That's real progress in the numbers. There's an upward trend in approvals, including units, over the previous 12 months.

Crucially, we are backing ambition with action. We're training more tradies; funding enabling infrastructure; cutting red tape, including pausing the National Construction Code; fast-tracking environmental approvals; and scaling up modern construction. That's how you cool housing pressure sustainably—by increasing supply through targeted actions, not chasing headlines. The idea that a single tax switch would magically tame inflation or shield households from interest rate movements simply doesn't stack up. Even the proponents of changing some of these tweaks have acknowledged that you may, at best, impact prices by one to two per cent. It's not the main game, and it distracts us from the main game of building more homes. Housing costs are rising because there aren't enough homes, not because of one line in the tax code. The fastest, most durable way to ease pressure on renters and mortgage holders is to build more homes where people live and work. That's what this government is doing.

I'll make another point that, while our opponents and the Greens party talk a lot about housing and so-called tax breaks, they've taken too many opportunities to actually oppose housing, even in our state of Tasmania. I know that there was a proposal in 2024 where the Tasmanian Greens actually joined the Liberals to vote down a UTAS relocation that promised 2,000 new homes in Tasmania. The Liberals and the Greens teamed up in Tasmania to block 2,000 new homes. That would have been 2,000 affordable new homes right in the heart of Hobart, where you need them. Instead, they're here debating motions and slogans, opposing actual, tangible progress we could have had in Hobart to give people 2,000 critical and affordable new homes they need—proving, once again, that when it comes to housing, they talk urgency but vote delay.

In 2025, when Hobart needed more homes, the Greens opposed expanding the urban growth boundary, slowing the release of new land and pushing housing pressure back onto renters and first home buyers through tighter supply. We need to be embracing the YIMBY attitude—'yes in my backyard'—saying yes to more housing, not the NIMBY attitude that the Greens embrace, which says, 'Let's tweak tax codes but vote for no new housing.' This government chooses construction over contention and delivery over delay. We are absolutely focused on solving this housing crisis, and we are focused on building more homes, not more hashtags. That's why this urgency motion misses the mark and why Labor will be focused on building the homes Australia actually needs.