Ms O'NEIL (Hotham—Minister for Housing and Minister for Homelessness) (15:46): I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the parliament about the government's incredibly broad and ambitious housing agenda. It's the broadest and most ambitious housing agenda a Commonwealth government has had for some decades. And the reason that we are taking this problem so seriously is very simple: this problem is having profound consequences for our country and for literally millions of Australians today. I want to talk to you about some of the people I've talked to in these early months in the portfolio and just express their deep emotion about how much this problem is affecting their lives. Speaker, a lot of those conversations, you wouldn't be surprised to know, have been with young people. I've talked to a lot of young renters around the country, and they've talked to me about just the desolate experience that they have when they're between homes, spending every Saturday morning—instead of being able to spend time with their friends and their family—in rental queues. Some of these rental queues around Melbourne will go for 40 or 50 people. People have to literally spend hours looking at a property that is dilapidated and that they don't even want to live in. At the end of that process, that doesn't mean the young person gets the rental. They've got to fight with the other people who are standing in that queue. We see a lot of illegal behaviour where people are being encouraged to bid against each other, effectively raising the rental price. Most of the young people in that queue miss out. They talk to me about the sense of dread that they feel standing in those queues, knowing they've wasted yet another half a day trying to get into a rental property that they don't want and, in the end, not even getting there. I've talked to a lot of parents, too. I hear quite a bit from parents about this. I think something that's really changed about the housing debate in this country is that, for the first time, the older generation are thinking about this in the context of those younger people. I talk to parents who are desperately worried about their children, and I'm not talking about 25- or 26-year-old children; they're worried about their teenage children and what the housing market will look like for them when they get into that age group. I talk to a lot of young people who are still living at home with their parents. They're not particularly young people but those who are 28 and 29—even young people in their 30s who are still at home with their parents just so they can try to get that opportunity to scrimp and save for a modest house deposit. I talk to a lot of renters who are living a life of intense instability. I rented when I was a young person; I'm sure you would have rented a bit in your youth as well, Speaker. My view is there comes a time when Australians are entitled to expect stability in their lives, and, really, that time is around when people look to start having a family. All of us have talked to constituents who are in their 30s, with young children who are in early years and in school, who are renting. This is exactly the sort of Australian family that in the 1980s would in all likelihood—almost certainly—have owned their own home. And yet, today, these people are locked out of the housing market. The impact this is having on their lives is absolutely profound. I've talked to mums who have children with disability, who have to pick those kids up and move them from one school to another because they don't have the stability and the housing that they need. All of us talk to constituents who are spending extensive amounts of time travelling—I'm talking about more than an hour a day and more than two hours a day in a car—when they could have been spending that precious time with their children and their family. All of this comes back to the problem that we're having with housing in our country We've got a really clear plan here, and it's one that we thought about a lot in opposition and brought forward. From the experts I talk to, there's pretty unanimous agreement that the things that the Labor government is trying to do about this problem are the right things—things that, frankly, could have been done a long time ago. We're having some issues though—you might have noticed, Speaker—in progressing a couple of areas of reform, and that is because we face an incredible intransigence in this parliament. We don't just have a broken housing market in this country; we have broken housing politics. What I mean by that is we've got a lot of parliamentarians who come in here, say all the right things, and then, when it's time to take action and make real progress for real people, they instead turn their back on Australians and choose politics over progress. We see that extensively from those who sit opposite me, and it's not much of a surprise really because housing has just never been a priority for the coalition. When I talk to Australians about what they feel produced the housing crisis that we're dealing with right now, they often point to what was effectively 10 years of inaction from those opposite. I'll remind you of a couple of things that really speak to this. We had a coalition government for almost a decade in this country, and for five of those years there was actually no Commonwealth housing minister. They're trying to get credibility in this debate. For most of the time they were in government, there was no Commonwealth housing minister. I try to be polite and respectful in this parliament, but there are a few things I could say about how the people they choose to lead this debate reflect the importance that they place on it, and I think we saw that with the choice of the housing minister and the current shadow housing minister. Mr Howarth: We reduced homelessness. Mr Sukkar: We were pretty successful by comparison. Ms O'NEIL: Everyone who is watching this debate can see that the Commonwealth alone can't fix this problem. Mr Howarth: Homelessness was lower under us. It's through the roof under your mob. Ms O'NEIL: We saw that state and territory housing ministers were not brought together—not at all. There was not a single conversation with state and territory housing ministers and the Commonwealth for the last five years that the coalition were in government. Mr Howarth: That's a lie! Ms O'NEIL: So I don't find surprising at all this extensive— The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): Honourable members. Mr Repacholi: Shut up! Ms O'NEIL: and rude interruption from those opposite. Mr Howarth: Tell the truth! The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Honourable members! Ms O'NEIL: Yes, could you call them to order? I'd be appreciative of that. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'm more than happy to make a call, but I'm asking you to give me the opportunity. Honourable members, you'll have your opportunity, and I'll make sure, when you're making your contribution, that the same respect is shown to you from the other side. Ms O'NEIL: Thank you so much, Deputy Speaker. So it is a real shame that we see a government that's got a plan here and those opposite, after their decade of complete inaction on this problem, will not let us make progress on some key parts of it. Unfortunately, we do see a pretty similar attitude from the Greens, who are important for us trying to get our housing agenda through the Senate. We're seeing it on the Help to Buy legislation, which is before the parliament at the moment. I'll be reintroducing that bill into the House very shortly, and I'm really hopeful that the Greens are able to take a beat and do the right thing and support the people that they say they care about. The Help to Buy legislation will come before the parliament again. It is about making sure that 40,000 childcare workers and aged care workers and early years teachers have the opportunity to own their own home. It's based on a pretty simple belief that ordinary people in our country should have the ability to access home ownership. Here we have the chance for the parliament to support 40,000 of those people into home ownership. Instead of allowing us to make progress on this matter, the Greens political party continue to play politics. I've spent a little bit of time in the last couple of weeks visiting states where shared-equity schemes—as the Help to Buy legislation is—are on foot at the moment and speaking to young people who have been able to use those schemes to get into home ownership. I met a wonderful young man, Yianni, last week in Adelaide. He's 26 years old. He's a physio at the local Defence base. He literally gets out of bed every morning and goes to a Defence base and assists veterans in trying to regain mobility after they've had injuries. He's spent his whole life so far living with his parents, and he talked to me about this opportunity of getting a shared-equity scheme—of starting out thinking that he had no chance of getting home ownership, then learning about a shared-equity scheme, putting aside that little bit of money that he could and then the incredible feeling that he had of actually getting that chance to own his first home. He said to me, ‘Any kind of scheme that helps people get into the housing market in this way is amazing,’ and he just talked to me about the experience he has now of having his own space. For him, it was about the experience of becoming an adult and having housing as a part of that. I also met with Emma in Melbourne last week, who is a researcher and who was able to buy her first property thanks to the Victorian shared-equity scheme. She talked to me about the experience she had, quite similarly to Yianni, where she had basically given up on home ownership—this amazing young person in Melbourne. She just talked to me about the genuine elation she felt and how she walked around the house after she got home ownership for the first time and thought to herself, ‘I can't believe this is mine and that I don't have to ask permission to paint the walls, that I don't have to worry about hanging a picture and that my dog can have a place they get to know where they can feel safe and comfortable.’ These are the things that home ownership means, and we can make 40,000 Emmas and Yiannis if we work together as a parliament to address this critical issue. Help to Buy is, of course, only one part of the government's agenda. We are working very hard with the states to build more homes in our country. We are working with the states to improve renters’ rights, and we've helped 120,000 people into home ownership through the home guarantee scheme so far. We've got a rich and broad housing agenda, and it's been a real pleasure to speak to the parliament about some of those initiatives. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I thank the honourable member for her contribution, and before I give the call to the most honourable member for Deakin, I would just acknowledge that the same courtesy will be given to the opposition that was extended— Honourable members interjecting— The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Once I got into the chair? I would suggest that— Honourable members interjecting— The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I give the call to the most honourable member for Deakin.