Wednesday, 18 October 2023

 Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:08): As we on this side of the house know, the critical issue facing Victorians right now is making sure that more Victorians have the opportunity to have the dignity of a roof over their head and that is why we are working very hard across government on our landmark housing statement, a package of initiatives to boost housing supply and affordability across the state. Now there might be some blockers and knockers who do not want us to build more homes, who do not want to see more Victorians have the dignity of a roof over their head, who are more interested in playing politics with the issue than making sure that we do everything we can to boost supply because we know when you build more homes, when you increase supply, it helps put downward pressure on the affordability pressures that we know that many people trying to get into the market are facing.

When you block every single initiative to boost supply, you are saying to Victorians, ‘We don’t care if you don’t have a place to sleep at night; we don’t care if you don’t have the dignity of a roof over your head’. We are taking a very different approach. That is why we have done the hard work to date on releasing the housing statement and we are now working in partnership with industry through our affordability partnership so that we can build more homes. Critical to that is making sure that we have the supply of workers. Just as we have announced we are going to have a pipeline of building more homes, we are going to provide certainty for business, but also for young tradies to see that they can start. They can go and do a free TAFE course. They can go and undertake their apprenticeship and training and know that there is a career ahead of them. That is why the announcement this week with the federal Albanese Labor government, who also is a lover of TAFE — Labor loves TAFE; that is why we had to save TAFE and reinvest in TAFE — was that we have signed a new national skills agreement to continue to support this sector.