Interview with Patricia Karvelas, Afternoon Briefing, ABC

Subjects: crisis housing grants, the housing market downturn, comments on public housing made by Pauline Hanson Patricia Karvelas: The federal government has today announced $300 million in new grants for crisis and transitional housing, which promises to deliver 500 new homes by 2029. Clare O’ Neil is the Housing Minister and my guest. Welcome to the program.

Clare O’Neil: Thanks for having me on, PK. This new grant money is for crisis housing. 500 additional homes through the HAFF, as it’s known. We won’t bore people with too many acronyms.

What is your timeline, though, for those houses to be built? So, under this program, the houses have to start construction within one year, and most of them have to be built within 2 years. We give a bit of extra latitude if they’re a particularly complex build, for example, medium‑density housing that’s in a city.

The absolute deadline, though, for the commitment of all of our social and affordable and crisis housing commitments that we’ve made is mid‑2029. By then, our government will have built 55,000 social and affordable homes desperately needed by our country. Reminding your viewers that that comes off the back of 9 years of the Coalition building 373 homes around the country.

It’s a massive endeavour, but the government rolling up its sleeves and actually building housing is a core part of how we need to respond to the housing issues facing Australia. And the National Plan to End Violence against Women and their Children is also being currently negotiated, the next iteration of that. How key will social housing for women who are fleeing domestic violence be in that plan?

Because ultimately, if you can’t find a home – you know this, all the research shows this – you will, you will be unlikely to leave. Yeah. And PK, women who don’t leave violent relationships tell us the main reason – one of the main reasons – is that they don’t want to send them and their children into homelessness.

And we should not, in Australia, have a situation where women are having to make the decision between being homeless and being in a violent household – just not on. So, this is partly the effects of really decades of underinvestment by governments in this critical part of housing that ended when our government was elected federally in 2022. Tanya Plibersek and I work incredibly closely on this, and I can tell you she is so passionate about trying to address this housing issue for women and children fleeing family violence.

So, the crisis housing that I talked about, that is largely for young people at risk of homelessness and women and children fleeing family violence. The social and affordable housing piece that our government’s also building is, you know, very largely about women who are in this situation. We’ve just got to do more to get on top of this violence problem, and housing is a big part of it.

Independent MP Nicolette Boele has put forward a bill today to support the creation of a national definition of affordable housing. The idea is backed by a couple of key groups, the Australian Community Housing and the Property Council of Australia. Are you open to that definition?

Well, we’re certainly open to a better definition nationally. If I can just explain to your viewers. We are almost creating a new category of housing in Australia, and this is really about aged‑care workers, teachers, nurses and other people who are kind of on those lower‑ and middle‑income wages being able to live in the communities that they service and work in.

We’re trying to push for a better housing mix around our cities and suburbs. The federal government has done a lot of this work by pushing affordable housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund. But, as is so often the case with our federal system, every state’s got a different definition, and we need to bring that together.

So, I’ve asked Treasury to do some work on this at the moment. I’m really committed to getting this, I would say, cleaned up because I want to see the stock of affordable housing grow around our country. In my view, the government’s got to do more of everything on housing if we’re going to get on top of the national housing challenge, and building more affordable housing is part of it.

On affordable housing, are you optimistic about the future of house prices? Well, our government wants to see more young Australians get into home ownership, and I’m certainly very optimistic about that. Our government has already created more first‑home owners in each and every year of our government than any other in Australian history by quite a wide margin, and I’m really proud of that.

The tax changes that we undertook in the Budget are about building on that effort. Those tax changes alone will reverse about 10 years of decline in the home‑ownership rate in our country. But I actually think there’s a lot more work for us to do here.

No one is looking at the Budget and looking at our, you know, incredibly ambitious record and saying, ‘That’s enough.’ We’ve still got a housing crisis in Australia, and there’s still a lot more work to do. And do you still need house prices to drop further to achieve your aim? Well, we certainly need house‑price growth to slow around Australia.

Maybe that’s controversial for people coming from the Housing Minister, but I absolutely believe it. Hasn’t it – well, some people would say, just to interrupt, sorry Minister, that it’s, you know, it’s kind of gone backwards. Like house prices are in crisis, you think it needs to grow even slower still?

Well, what I’m saying is that over the medium term, we need to have slower house‑price growth in Australia than we’ve had for the last 25 years in particular. We have seen in our country 400 per cent house‑price growth since the year 2000. That is why a low‑income young couple today is half as likely to own their own home as they were in the year that I was born.

And PK, the thing that is really important to me about this is that people understand this is not just about people having a roof over their head. This is about the kind of Australia that we want to live in. And if we live in a country where that happens again for another generation, Australia will be unrecognisable to us.

And I was raised to believe that having a fair and equal country was the best thing about Australia. Home ownership has been a part of that, and we want to restore that for more young people. The price changes have happened in the middle and the higher end, not as much at the entry level.

Is that disappointing to you? Do you want to see more movement at that entry level? Well, I mean, again, we want to see more young people getting into home ownership.

And I don’t get into the day to day, week to week of what goes on in the housing market for very good reason. And that is that we end up having a wildly different debate from month to month, especially if I look at it from where we were a year ago on housing. PK, you were probably interviewing me, badgering me, because house prices were flying up too quickly.

Probably was badgering you, yeah. Great respect to you. So, I don’t get into the short‑term movements.

What I can tell you is that we want more young people to get the chance of home ownership that their parents and grandparents had. And we are pushing on that, having some real success, but there’s more work to do. The comments that Pauline Hanson made about public housing and the Prime Minister’s mother.

She has been widely condemned for the comments about his mother. His mother is dead. It’s considered quite inappropriate by most people, as far as I can see.

But the substantial comment about this public housing, who gets access to it, whether people should stay long term, what are your reflections on that? Well, firstly, I think the comments were so out of line, callous, cruel, personal, and just the kind of politics that I don’t want to see seep into our culture here in Australia. It should not be on for people’s parents to become, you know, part of the political debate.

Anthony Albanese was obviously incredibly close to his mother. Deeply offensive to him and to the government, and Pauline Hanson absolutely should apologise. As she should apologise for Andrew Hastie, a decorated war veteran, for calling him a traitor.

As she should apologise for what she said today, the offensive comments about First Nations Australians. So, your point about public housing is a really important one for me because the inference that she makes that somehow, in her mind, there are, you know, wealthy people, perhaps, you know, undeserving people in public housing, I don’t think the facts are there to support that.

The vast, vast majority of public housing tenants in our country are, unfortunately, in a deeply disadvantaged position. And we talk about this in the abstract. I think about the conversations that I have with Australians.

Australians are fair‑minded, generous, good people. They want to see the worst‑off in our society looked after. And I don’t know how you can have Pauline Hanson, you know, decrying a homelessness problem in our country and at the same time saying that some of the most vulnerable people in Australia should get kicked out of public housing.

Like, it just doesn’t make sense. Matt Canavan made a really interesting comment before that I’d love your reflections on. He said some of the censuring of Pauline Hanson, all of that has actually helped build her up as a kind of martyr figure.

Do you agree that sometimes to react to Pauline Hanson or to overreact – which is what he was implying – actually plays into her hands? I don’t want to get into the personalness of it, and I think we need to take care there. But I also strongly believe that there’s a right and a wrong in politics and it’s part of my job to call it out.

Ok, so it’s important to call out, for instance, her comments about Aboriginal people being primitive. I think we can talk about the politics and what should Labor say and what should the Liberals say and all the rest of it; at the end of the day, I’ve got a moral duty to call out rights and wrongs. And when we’ve got a politician, a national leader, who is running around the country, you know, besmirching public housing tenants, besmirching, you know, the oldest living culture in the world, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do to stay silent.

That’s my personal view. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, PK.

And that was the Housing Minister, Clare O’Neil, on new grants for crisis housing, Pauline Hanson’s comments, and of course, the broader housing downturn we’re seeing.