COMMITTEES

Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (17:03): As a member of the Senate committee examining productivity, I can say this has been a really excellent committee. We've heard a vast amount of testimony from right across the housing and construction industry on some of the problems associated with the building of more houses in Australia. It is a complex and wicked problem that has plagued successive governments over generations.

But, as a government, we are not here now to admire this problem. The scale of it demands an ambitious and expansive response, because we have a situation now in Australia where an entire generation of young people have lost hope that they will ever own a home. We also have a situation where salaries have become completely decoupled from house prices.

This has happened over a period of around 30 years, fuelled by the interaction between capital gains tax and negative gearing—add on 15 years of cheap credit, and the whole thing detonated. House prices raced away from incomes. We have a situation where it takes somewhere between 10 to 13 times your median income to buy a home in Sydney.

In Melbourne, it's a little bit better, but it's not that much better. It's nine to 10 times the median income to buy a home. This is clearly in the impossibly unaffordable range for most Australians, hence we have a generation of young people who have given up on the prospect of ever owning a home.

But I want to say to those young people that we haven't given up—in fact, quite the opposite. We are doubling down on action to address this problem, and, given the scale of this problem, we are attacking it from every angle. We have to.

And so we have a range of measures in a $47 billion Homes for Australia program. I'm going to break this down. There's a lot to unpack with every single measure.

It's not just about building homes, though, I might add. It's also about ensuring we have those tradespeople to build those homes. They're not built by machines; they're built by people.

They've got to have the requisite skills. It also means that we need to ensure that the migrant workers we have here in Australia are actually working to top of scope so that, if they are tradies, they're not driving Ubers but instead working on construction sites. We also have to make sure that the construction industry has integrity and that workers are protected, because, as we learnt in this inquiry, this is a high-risk industry.

It is high risk when it comes to occupational health and safety as well as mental health outcomes, which are very poor in this industry largely because of the type of work—manual, heavy, hard work—but also because it is very much male dominated, and these tend to be features of gender-segregated industries. In terms of the key measures, I might talk to some of the ones that we've already brought through before I go to the taxation changes.

We expanded the five per cent home deposit scheme towards the end of last year—I think it was October of last year—and we have seen, since coming to government, an additional 270,000 Australians enter homeownership, which means that they are paying their mortgage instead of someone else's mortgage. This is an unalloyed good. It is a good thing.

Those opposite hate this scheme. They think it is 'middle-class welfare' because we removed income caps. I say to them that we removed income caps because income has become decoupled from house prices.

We can't just stand back and admire this problem. We have to act. We have to give them a foot in the door.

We also launched another scheme which doesn't get anywhere near enough attention. It was voted down by the coalition like just about every single housing measure. It's called the Help to Buy scheme.

Help to Buy is designed for people on very modest incomes, low incomes, and it enables them to get into a house with a two per cent deposit with the government taking somewhere between 30 to 40 per cent equity in their home. This is pitched to people who never in a million years thought they would ever own a home, and we have seen over 3,000 applicants for this program already.

We also introduced the Housing Australia Future Fund, a $10 billion fund which the coalition hate and talk down at every turn. They want to abolish it, if they ever form government. The problem with that is this is a fund designed to build 55,000 social and affordable homes for key workers like nurses, teachers and emergency personnel—the people who help run this country, the people who are mission critical to running this country but those opposite hate.

They hate the workers, and they hate the Housing Australia Future Fund. They voted against it. In fact, they tried to move a disallowance motion against the Housing Australia Future Fund in the Senate.

We have made some adjustments to taxation settings for Build to Rent. Build to Rent is a relatively new asset class in Australia, but it's very common elsewhere, and it's for institutional investors. This is where we bring foreign capital in; it mixes with domestic capital, and we build at scale.

I've seen some of these completed developments in Melbourne, in Kensington, and they are very impressive. They are large-scale, very liveable spaces. They are bright, warm, modern, with sustainable materials.

They have common spaces. The one I toured had a swimming pool. It had more than one gym, a yoga centre, a dance studio.

It came with all the bells and whistles, and it was popular. People were renting out these apartments. Beautiful.

A community secure, with a predominance of women because women felt safe in these kinds of developments. For those people who are at acute risk of homelessness, we have introduced, and supported them with, back-to-back Commonwealth rent assistance increases. In this budget, we've also put in another $40 million towards modern methods of construction.

This goes to modular housing—again relatively new in Australia, but it could be a complete game changer. It uses a pattern, a template, to build homes which, by definition, then become cheaper for consumers. There's no compromise on quality, but these become cheaper.

In terms of cutting red tape, we have paused the National Construction Code, and we're putting some work into converting that weighty document into something that can be enabled through AI, which will make it a lot easier for builders to navigate. Also on the topic of red tape, we have committed $47 million to working with subnational governments throughout this country, the states and territories, to help them implement the new environmental laws that we passed with the help of the Greens political party, voted against by the coalition.

The coalition parade around this country, talking about housing, how they care about young people, how they're so worried about the fact that they can't get a foot in the door and how they care about workers: 'Isn't it terrible that housing is so unaffordable? What a terrible job the government's doing!' But what they fail to tell Australians is that when they come into the peak decision chamber of this country, this parliament, they vote against every single measure to actually increase housing supply or enable Australians to get into houses with smaller deposits.

It's utterly disingenuous. At every step we will call out your fraud. I did say that houses are not built by machines; they're built by humans.

We have a really ambitious program to train up more Aussies to encourage them to take up an apprenticeship in housing construction. To that end, we have a $10,000 Key Apprenticeship Program, the housing construction apprenticeship, which opened on 1 July last year and has already seen nearly 30,000 apprentices start in this trade. What could be better?

These kids, these young people, will walk into jobs and they will be in secure jobs for a very long time because this government is committed to building. We are going to build our way out of this crisis, and that does mean that we need to also have discussions in our local communities with those people who are resistant to change, the NIMBYs, the 'Not in my backyard' crowd.

We need to be honest with each other that if we don't build, if we don't densify our cities in a sustainable, sympathetic way, we will never address this problem of housing affordability. That is not something this government will tolerate.