QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms O'NEIL (Hotham—Minister for Housing, Minister for Homelessness and Minister for Cities) (14:27): I appreciate the question from the member opposite. She asked about the legislation that passed the parliament on Thursday, legislation that delivered every single one of Australia's 13 million workers with a tax cut, and legislation that, for the first time, puts first home buyers in our country on a level playing field with investors.
Why has the government taken this action? Because we see the pain that the housing crisis is causing Australians, and, instead of ignoring their problems like those opposite chose to do in the nine years that they were in government, we are delivering real change for Australians. With regard to the impact on house prices, I think the parliament is very well versed on this one.
In the medium term, the advice from Treasury is that house prices in Australia will continue to rise but a little bit more slowly than they otherwise would have. There's a lot that goes into house prices, interest rates being the dominant factor. I hope and I expect that those opposite understand that the Treasury modelling showed a slightly slower growth rate of about two percentage points slower than otherwise would have been the case.
What do we get for that? We get something incredibly special. Opposition members interjecting— Ms O'NEIL: That is 75,000 Australians who will go from renting into homeownership.
Once again, I'm hearing the guffaws, and I'm hearing the rabble opposite me try to piece together something useful and intelligent to say about housing policy, which, no doubt, they will fail to do, again. We had one of the frontbenchers give a notable interview today saying that her party needs a rebrand. Let me be really clear.
I think she's making some good points! The SPEAKER: Can the minister cease making her points for a moment so I can hear from the manager. Mr Tehan: I wouldn't be worried about good points when you've got a housing market collapse.
The SPEAKER: Resume your seat. We're not going to slide into bad habits with only comments. You make the point on relevance.
The Leader of the Opposition and the manager have done so, but you're not going to take advantage of the standing orders. So we'll just rein that in a little bit. The minister wasn't asked about alternative policies; she was asked about the policy she's responsible for.
She can do some compare and contrast, but she can't just start randomly talking about the opposition, because she wasn't asked about the opposition and their name or anything to do with that. She was asked about what she's responsible for. So the manager is correct.
I'm upholding his point of order. I just want to make sure you return to the question. Ms O'NEIL: Absolutely, Speaker.
I'm very happy to do so. I'm simply making the point that we've got frontbenchers openly saying that they need to rethink the existence of their political party. On this side of the parliament, we're living a very different experience.
We don't need any experts to tell us what the great Australian Labor Party stands for. We stand for equality, we stand for aspiration and we stand for first home buyers of our country getting the fair go that they deserve.