QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms O'NEIL (Hotham—Minister for Housing, Minister for Homelessness and Minister for Cities) (14:45): I thank the member for Bullwinkel for her question. For millions of Australians, owning their own home is their dream, and our government is fighting to give them a fair shot at it. It means helping them clear the deposit hurdle through our massively popular five per cent deposit program, and it's about our housing tax reforms, which give first home buyers, for the first time, a level playing field at every auction in the country.
We are already seeing first home buyers jump into those opportunities, building on 270,000 Australians that our government has already supported into homeownership. What is really important is that we are not asking Australians to trash their retirement savings to get the opportunities for homeownership that they deserve. Super for housing is back in the news again.
This is the zombie policy of Australian politics. Time and time again, the Australian people have heard the arguments. They have rejected the policy, and yet here we are again.
It's back in a twisted and even more damaging form. One of the things I find so offensive about super for housing is that One Nation and the coalition aren't even talking about how to try to fix the broken housing market. What they're focused on is: how do they make Australians pay more for their failures?
One Nation's big idea is not just super for housing but now super for everything. Anyone who looks at a policy like that can immediately see the awful consequences that will result from such a terrible idea. But the member for New England was asked about the economic consequences of this policy last night, and his response was, 'I'm not Jesus Christ.' Well, I say to the member for New England that no-one is under the illusion that he is Jesus Christ, and he wasn't being asked to perform a miracle.
He was being asked to do something very basic that all of us in this chamber are called upon to do, and that is explain the consequences of our policies. So I'm going to tell you what it would mean, Speaker. What One Nation's policy would mean is that everything in the economy would cost more and that more Australians will retire into poverty than otherwise would have.
That is not a good thing for our country, and it's not a good thing for Australians. We have a really simple view: Australians should not have to choose between security today and dignity tomorrow. Our approach is simple.
We want to help people buy a home, we want to protect their super and we want to make sure that they get the dignified retirement that they deserve.