Thursday, 2 November 2023

Housing

Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (17:26): (429) My adjournment this evening is also to the Minister for Housing, and the action I seek is that the minister update the house on how the government intends to deliver 800,000 homes over 10 years. I feel like we are on shuffle, repeat, but that is okay. Eighty thousand homes a year – let us break this down – is 220 homes a day every day, Monday to Sunday, 24/7. What is angering my community is that it is being treated like a joke by the minister. On 24 October the Minister for Housing posted on Facebook an image that said:

How many Big Housing Build homes are we building in regional Victoria?

Tap to find out

And when you tapped on it it said:

Close to 3,000.

Well, unfortunately just tapping on Facebook will not deliver 3000 homes in regional Victoria, and my community would like to know how many of those homes will be delivered in the seat of Narracan. What is doubtful about this commitment is whether the government can achieve it on the statistics that I have in front of me today.

It might surprise you to know, but we have had a 6.3 per cent decrease in construction workers since May this year – that is over 21,000 less construction workers in the industry today. In the year to June 2023 we had 619 building companies collapse. Since 1990 the average number of homes built per year has been 46,000. In 2022–23 – it was not a bad year – there were 54,000 homes built, and the best year that we have had since 1990 was between 2017 and 2018, when it was 75,000 homes. I would like to see the plan that the minister has going forward because, to quote The Wolf of Wall Street, to be perfectly honest this is:

Fugayzi, fugazi … It’s fairy dust.

That is not on the elemental chart, and I doubt this will ever exist without more data from the minister and the government.