QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms O'NEIL (Hotham—Minister for Housing, Minister for Homelessness and Minister for Cities) (15:04): I want to thank the member for his question. The member for McEwen is such a champion for housing, and I want to report to the parliament that, as of today, he has helped 2,608 of his constituents get the keys to their own homes. How fantastic is that?
He is working so deeply with our government to tackle the bigger housing challenges facing our country. The honourable member knows, as I do, that if we want our country to build more homes then we must make it easier to build them. Right across our country, for a long time, we've had a situation where a builder will have a piece of land.
They'll have a homebuyer but they will be stuck in the housing process. They'll be stuck waiting for an approval. They'll be stuck waiting on a road to be delivered, stuck waiting for water to be connected, stuck waiting on the tradie that they need.
The simple truth is it is too hard to build a home in this country. It takes too long to get housing built. That is why our government is stepping up and working across the three levels of government to have an impact on this problem.
One of the really critical parts of this that the Commonwealth has a lot of influence over is the National Construction Code. We're working really closely with builders across the country to reform that code. It is too long, it is too complex, and that's why we've paused the code for five years.
We're making the code simpler to understand, simpler to use and simpler to comply with. Now we've got the opposition leader, in his customarily rude way, yelling at me, as though the Labor government invented the National Construction Code. I mean, how ridiculous, and what a terrible pattern of behaviour, for those opposite to consistently come into this parliament and pretend that we've only had housing issues facing our country for the last four years.
What a joke. We've got 28 million Australians who can see that's not the case. What they've got in charge is a government that takes this problem seriously and is actually stepping up and acting.
We are seeing real progress. Through the EPBC Act changes, we've smashed through 82,000 environmental approvals that were sitting there, and we're seeing the fruits of this. I want to remind the parliament that the latest ABS data tells us that we have almost 250,000 homes under construction right now, right around our country.
That is the highest level since records began. We are taking a comprehensive and massive approach to housing. Those opposite have not a single sensible thing to say about this.
One of the biggest problems facing the country, other than the shadow minister for housing's ridiculous suggestion that disadvantaged Australians should live in substandard homes—shame on them—is we need serious reform of this system. We need to do better by Australians, and that's exactly what our government is delivering.