QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator TYRRELL (Tasmania) (16:33): I'd like to thank Senator Bragg for bringing up housing, and I'd like to talk about that. We love housing. We want more housing.

We're putting money out there for the whole of Australia to get more homes. Senator Kovacic: But still there are no houses. Senator TYRRELL: But, in our first term, we took the Commonwealth from being a negligent bystander, Senator Kovacic, to being the boldest and most ambitious Commonwealth government since the World War II with an ambitious $47 billion plan and the vast majority going towards building more homes.

I love myself a good home, and this budget builds on that plan. Home building is turning around. Home starts are up 26 per cent on this time last year, and construction cost inflation has fallen from 17 per cent under the coalition, a half-century high, to 2.5 per cent. 660,000 homes have been built since we were elected.

I might even say that again. 660,000 homes have been built since Labor was elected. Our targets are ambitious. That's the whole point of it, though.

It's designed to drive national change to our housing system. The right response here is not to lower the national ambition or indeed to have none at all, as unfortunately we saw from the coalition in their last term. We need a bit of guts and courage.

You saw this from our government in our first term, and you'll see it all the way through our second term. To unlock these homes in our cities, suburbs and regions, we're training more tradies, building more infrastructure, investing in innovation and cutting red tape. I'd like to give a shout-out to Loreto Community Housing in my home state of Tasmania.

They took me through a tour in Newnham the other day of 49 homes, single bedroom all the way up to four bedroom, that are going to be low socio and give people the opportunity to have a place to call their own and to raise their children. They're available for people with disabilities and those that are struggling, and they're going to be well supported. Loreto, you're legends.

The tradies that were there on the day, working in the rain and showing us around in the mud—you too are legends. Building homes is going to actually increase the tradies that we have in our communities because we need more tradies to do what we need to do, which is build homes and keep people in our home states. Speaking of the states, Labor is working with the states and territories to implement substantial planning reforms and scale up modern methods of construction.

We're also directly investing in building new social and affordable homes, like the ones I mentioned at Loreto in Newnham. What matters is the longer term trend. Building approvals have increased three years in a row.

Approvals are higher than when the coalition left office, when they were going backwards by 21.7 per cent. Starts and completions are also higher than when the coalition left office. There seems to be a trend where we are lifting the game, we are aiming high and we are going to achieve.

You know what? If we're not going to aim high, we shouldn't be here. We should aspire to do better.

We should collaborate, cooperate and do what the people of Australia did when they elected us—have an expectation that we will do better. That's something that I hope that everybody in this place aspires to. In the last term, those opposite stood in the path of more housing at every opportunity, and it feels like they keep on talking negatively about what we can and can't do.

But they had an opportunity to do a lot, and they chose not to do a lot. So, in our second term and maybe our third and fourth, we're going to aspire and inspire the people of Australia to aim high, dream big and achieve great things.