Michael Sukkar MP

Statement by Members: Housing in Australia

One thing we know about tonight’s budget is that there’s absolutely no new money for housing. There’s nothing to address Labor’s housing crisis: no new money, no new homes, no new ideas, no new thinking—just the same old Labor housing crisis. We saw the Labor Party try to rebadge and rehash funding that has been ongoing for 15 years now and somehow claim that it as new. The truth is that under this government we’ve seen the number of first home buyers go down and we’ve seen the number of homes go down. Most worryingly, if Australians think there’s a housing crisis now, it is just going to get worse, because the number of approvals has gone down even further. That means that over the next 12 months, 18 months or two years fewer homes will be built.

In the time when fewer homes were being built and fewer Australians were able to afford to own their own home, this government ramped up migration and brought in four times as many migrants as the number of houses being built. Where on earth does the government think they will live? What this is doing is putting pressure on our rental market. It’s putting pressure on every single Australian family. And, sadly, tonight we see no recognition from this government that it has created a housing crisis and that it has an obligation to address it.

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