It’s very telling that, when discussing the achievements of this government in housing, the government refers to the Home Guarantee Scheme, which is a very proud coalition achievement. We are very complimentary that the government has taken on the coalition’s Home Guarantee Scheme and is very enthusiastically spruiking it in this place, but let’s be clear: that is an achievement of the former coalition government.

What governments have to do is come up with some of their own policies. You can’t just dine out on the policies you inherited from the former coalition government. Let’s be frank: the government’s housing policies and housing plan—if you can describe it as a plan—are in absolute tatters. The housing agenda in Australia is not being led from this building; it’s not being led from anywhere. What we see under a Labor federal government is that first home buys are down, new home builds are down, rents are up and the housing stock in Australia is not growing at the pace at which it needs to. And what do we see from the government? We see nothing. We see discussions about meetings, and meetings for more meetings, and we see a bold series of media releases talking about 30,000 social and affordable homes being built over five years. That’s less than what was delivered in the last five years. We see the Rudd-esque announcement in the budget about a million well-located homes, presumably being delivered by the private sector with no assistance from the government. By the way, to the government: we built more than a million homes in the last five years. What we see from the government is these ambitions and numbers thrown out there in this farcical way, and, even if they meet them, they would be delivering less than what has been delivered in the immediate past. What do we not hear from the government? We don’t hear anyone in the government talking about first home buyers. First home buyers have been completely forgotten by this government. That would partly explain why their numbers keep reducing.

The former coalition government took first home buyers from around 100,000 a year to 180,000 in the last full financial year that the government was in place, which shows that if you have a laser-like focus on first home buyers you can move the dial. But instead, now, we have a minister and a government that refuse to talk about first home buyers. They keep talking about the 30,000 social and affordable homes that they’ll deliver over five years from 1 July 2024—that is, for the first 18 months of their government, nothing will happen. We’re now 10 months into this government, and how many homes has the government delivered? How many out of the 30,000 social and affordable homes has the government delivered? Zero—zero homes in 10 months. After a while the Australian people will say: ‘Hold on. These media releases don’t mean much, and these lofty numbers that you throw out at budget time don’t mean much if they don’t mean homes on the ground, if they don’t mean homes that first home buyers can purchase and if they don’t mean new homes to reduce the impact on rents’—and let’s not forget about the 30 per cent of people who rent.

Instead, what we have now is the government in a quagmire in the Senate with their Housing Australia Future Fund. It’s an additional $10 billion of Commonwealth borrowings which, before even $1 can come out of that fund, will cost Australian taxpayers approximately $400 million a year. So the first $400 million just covers the interest on the debt. Then, if there’s something leftover—which is a big ‘if’, particularly when you look at the Future Fund, which shrunk last year—then that can potentially go into housing projects. There’s no certainty for the industry. It’s no wonder that they’re having difficulties getting that through the Senate—because it is such a half-baked plan.

The Reserve Bank at the moment is saying to the government, very loudly, ‘Stop spending’, because, for every extra billion that the government spends, the Reserve Bank has got to take a billion out. That’s why millions of mortgage holders are under more stress now, under Labor, than they need to be, and it’s why millions of Australian homeowners will be under even more mortgage stress—because Labor cannot control their borrowing and spending.

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