The new housing and homelessness minister, Clare O’Neil, is “intensely concerned” about the plight of renters and has promised “profound and transformative” investment to alleviate the housing crisis.
But with implementation of Labor’s existing $32bn of commitments a priority, O’Neil is offering more continuity than change in her new portfolio, which she inherited from Julie Collins in the July reshuffle.
O’Neil said the Albanese government is “not thinking about” amendments to build-to-rent incentives and was non-committal about the prospect of offering new money to help pass the incentives or the Help to Buy shared equity scheme.
Housing is shaping up as a major election battleground, with 13 interest rate rises putting the squeeze on mortgage-holders and rents rising faster than wages.
The Greens and the Coalition are holding up two Labor housing bills currently before parliament. The minor party is pushing for a rent freeze and public housing developer, and the opposition wants to expand its signature super for housing policy.
O’Neil, who exited the politically fraught home affairs role in the reshuffle, said the Australian housing crisis was the “result of 30 years of under-investment by all levels of government”.
“We have not been building enough homes over a really long period of time,” she said.
O’Neil blamed the Coalition for the commonwealth “tapping out of this problem”, citing housing ministers not meeting “for the last five years of the Coalition government”.
O’Neil said the Albanese government had committed $32bn “to try and fix this issue” and had used the national housing accord to set a target of building 1.2m homes over five years.
“The policy transformation between what was going on previously and what our government is doing is genuinely radical,” she told Guardian Australia.
O’Neil said she will not spend time thinking about whether housing is a human right because she is focused on “building more homes (and) helping people who can’t access the housing market get into [it]”.
“In particular,” O’Neil said she wanted to “help renters who are a group of people I am intensely concerned about at the moment”.
Asked what more can be done for tenants, O’Neil said Labor has a “good long-term solution” – the 1.2m home construction target.
Labor had also lifted commonwealth rent assistance in consecutive budgets, she said. This was “very significant” because one million renters were about $1,000 a year better off, she said.
O’Neil said she is focused on “working hard with state colleagues” to ensure “important” commitments at national cabinet on renters’ rights were implemented.
Asked about the public sector’s share of all new residential building approvals falling from 15% in the 1960s to the current 2%, O’Neil acknowledged there is “no single solution”.
Labor’s help-to-buy scheme and build-to-rent incentives were “important pieces of the puzzle that will help make a real impact”.
Asked why Labor is not offering new money to help pass the bills – as it did during the impasse over the Housing Australia Future Fund – O’Neil urged the Coalition and Greens to “come to Canberra, do their jobs and be part of the solution”. She cited a “very unfortunate history … of other parties trying to block” housing bills.
O’Neil claimed the Coalition’s super for housing policy “will jack up the price of housing for everyone”.
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, the Property Council warned the build-to-rent changes were unlikely to increase supply. The Greens housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, labelled it a “humiliating day” for the Labor bill.
“The new housing minister should take this chance to come back to the drawing board and negotiate a real plan with the Greens that includes a nationwide freeze and cap on rent increases, phase-out of tax handouts for property investors and a mass investment in public housing,” he said.
