There is no conversation right now that is more important than the one that we are collectively having on housing.
It is one of the defining challenges facing Victoria as our population grows, and it goes to the heart of how we support people right now and how we plan for the future.
Victoria is set to exceed 10 million people by 2050, and Melbourne is expected to remain Australia’s fastest growing city.
Communities feel this inevitable growth in their everyday lives, with housing affordability and availability squeezing people to make really difficult decisions.
So people in my community and across Victoria are rightly having deep discussions about how we build more homes, services and infrastructure over these next decades.
We are talking about what it means to have a stable home in the suburb you love and how it gives you a base to hold down a job, get a good education and provide for your family.
We are talking about what makes our suburbs work and, crucially, how to grow them in a way that supports affordability, sustainability and livability.
People are really alive to the fact that the status quo is not an option here.
We know that meeting housing need means increasing the supply of housing.
We know that we have to give people more options, whether that is social housing, affordable housing, private rental housing or stronger pathways into home ownership.
People want housing choice in the suburbs that they know and love – close to public transport, jobs and services, close to their friends and family and connected in with great healthcare and great schools.
That happens when we increase supply, and that is exactly what our Labor government is doing.
Victoria is building and approving thousands more homes than any other state.
We continue to be number one in home approvals, number one in home starts and number one in home completions, and we are making the planning system work so it is easier and more affordable for young people to find their first home.
We are changing our rental system so renters have more certainty and security.
Whether you want to buy or rent a home or a house or an apartment in Melbourne, the data shows it will be more affordable than in Sydney or Brisbane.
This is a grievance debate, so what I rise to grieve for are the millions of Victorians who would be left bereft of housing options under the Liberal Party’s catastrophic housing plan.
This so-called plan concentrates density into the CBD and the outer urban fringe.
It cuts 300,000 homes and locks people out of established suburbs.
Let us be really clear about what that means.
It means millions of Victorians lose their dream of owning a home.
It means family and friends are separated and people on lower incomes are pushed into greater disadvantage.
It means longer commutes, more dependence on cars, less access to schools and healthcare and encroachment into crucial agricultural land as people are pushed further and further out with urban sprawl.
The social and environmental impacts are appalling, yet this is the Liberal Party’s answer to the housing crisis.
But do not worry, their prized suburbs of Brighton, Hawthorn, Kew and Sandringham will not feel the impact because part of their plan is to revoke our reforms to enable more homes in places that are well established with services.
Some of those suburbs are losing people under 65 at a rapid rate.
They are becoming childless suburbs, and still that is not enough incentive for the Liberal Party to support a basic townhouse code or more apartments near train stations.
The Liberal Party’s plan explicitly avoids the suburbs they represent, effectively reserving those suburbs for existing landholders while locking out young people and millennials.
That is not a housing policy, that is political strategy masquerading as planning reform.
It is reckless because when we fail to plan for growth we do not stop growth, we simply push people further away from opportunity.
What is most striking about the Liberal housing plan is not just what it includes but whom it leaves out.
Renters are nowhere to be found in their plan.
They are completely ignored.
It is typical of their playbook really.
Last year we ended no-fault evictions so renters could no longer simply be told to leave their home without a genuine reason.
That reform has given people stability.
It has allowed people to stay close to their kids’ schools, to keep connected to their jobs and to embed themselves in their communities.
Yet when that reform came before this Parliament, those opposite opposed it.
They tried to amend the legislation to strip it out. One-third of Victorians rent, yet for the Liberal Party it is like they do not exist.
They are happy to protest apartments being built in their suburbs, but when it comes to protecting renters from being pushed out of their communities it is crickets.
As Parliamentary Secretary for Renters I am really proud that Victoria now has the strongest renter protection framework in the country.
Through steady practical reform we have strengthened security, improved conditions and helped stabilise the rental market.
We ended no-fault evictions so renters cannot simply be asked to leave.
We banned rental bidding outright, ending secret price wars that forced renters to outbid each other just to secure a home.
We extended notice periods for rent rises and notices to vacate from 60 days to 90, giving renters more time and certainty to plan their lives.
We strengthened protections against unfair rent increases and banned the extra fees platforms were charging just to pay rent.
We tackled discrimination in the application process with a standardised rental application form, removing invasive questions and requiring agents to properly manage renters’ personal information.
We have established a free rental dispute resolution service to help resolve issues, and we are doubling funding for renter support services.
For the first time we also introduced registration and training requirements for real estate agents and property managers, raising standards across the sector.
But we are not stopping there.
We have plans to cap lease-break fees so renters are not paying months of rent on properties they have had to leave.
From 2027 rentals will have another significant uplift in minimum standards, with the need to have efficient electric cooling alongside improved insulation and draughtproofing.
That means reducing energy bills, improving comfort and making homes more resilient to extreme heat.
In a fantastic change we will soon have a portable bond scheme so renters no longer have to find two bonds when they are moving between homes.
Instead the government will temporarily cover the new bond until the previous one is released, removing one of the biggest financial barriers renters face when relocating.
These are tangible real-life changes that bring greater stability to people’s lives, and they are working.
The latest Domain rental report showed that Melbourne’s house rentals are the most affordable of all Australian capital cities, and our apartment rentals remain more affordable than those in Brisbane and Sydney.
This is the difference between those who talk about renters to boost their election campaigns and a Labor government that has been steadily delivering reforms that make renting fairer every single year.
It is fair to say that I could have spent my whole 15 minutes grieving about the Greens political party and their utter hypocrisy on housing policy or their highly manipulative approach to rental reform, and it certainly bears mentioning because renters need one other crucial element beyond our legislative and regulatory reforms, and that element is more homes.
This is why it is so abhorrent that the Greens continue to try to gaslight Victorians that they are the champions of renters, all while their track record shows them blocking housing supply.
Time and again, when housing projects come forward, the Greens seem indistinguishable from the Liberal Party in opposing them.
I have seen it in my own community in Northcote: project after project in my inner-north community being blocked and delayed because of Greens votes on council. This includes 99 homes in Preston that they set back by about a year until the Minister for Housing had to call it in. At the time Minister Wynne said:
If not for this unnecessarily protracted process with council for no avail, the construction of the 99 social housing dwellings for the most vulnerable members of the community would have already commenced.
That is just one example, but it is emblematic of the appalling attitude the Greens political party have to housing and the contempt that they show people who need that housing.
At Walker Street in Northcote they tried for years to block the renewal of outdated, decaying buildings.
Lidia Thorpe used it as a campaign platform, and the Greens who came after her continued the trend.
We were not deterred.
There are now another 99 warm, dignified, modern homes giving Victorians a secure place to live.
I visited one of those social homes with the Premier recently. We met with Shadya, who welcomed us with warmth into her apartment, brewing traditional Eritrean coffee from scratch and serving it with ambasha bread. Shadya is a mother of five and works hard as a cleaner. She spoke with such pride about her home and what it has meant for her and her youngest son to live at Walker Street in Northcote.
When you speak to someone like Shadya, you understand that these are not just buildings, they are places of belonging and hope.
The Greens opposed Shadya’s home being built.
On social media they still voice opposition to this project, completely out of touch with the real people living there in our community, completely out of touch with the essential workers who make our suburbs vibrant and who deserve a home.
The Greens opposed both the Northcote and the Preston sites, which now have 198 new social homes, a 75 per cent uplift on what was available before.
Alongside those social homes are hundreds of private homes too, because meeting housing needs means increasing supply across the board.
Twenty per cent of those private homes were reserved for first home buyers so they did not have to compete with investors. These are real quality homes that change lives for the better, and the Greens oppose them to their shame.
The hard truth about the Greens is that they are a blunt instrument incapable of seeing the nuance in public policy, because they are too focused on sloganeering.
It is why we see appalling positions like blocking the Housing Australia Future Fund in the federal Senate or demonising the not-for-profit community housing sector, which provides social homes and social support to so many vulnerable people.
Increasingly, though, their cynical tactics are being exposed.
The former Greens member for Griffith let that cat out of the bag.
After months of teaming up with the coalition to refuse to pass the crucial HAFF legislation, he penned an article effectively admitting that it was part of a strategy to sow disaffection to mobilise disadvantaged sections of society in support of the Greens, basically using people’s lives as a campaign recruitment tool.
This is the disingenuous, mean-spirited contempt with which the Greens treat vulnerable people.
It does not matter to them whether homes get built or not. They will block it if it means they can shake out a few votes.
Like I said, the cat is out of the bag.
The member for Griffith was ousted, as was the Greens member for Melbourne.
People are realising just how fraudulent they actually are.
They can see the protest politics and the simplistic slogans, the obstructiveness and the divisiveness, the political gymnastics they perform to take credit for Labor’s reforms.
People are fed up with it.
There are real challenges facing our community, real cost-of-living pressures, real housing pressures.
People need real reforms that make their lives easier and fairer.
In my own community in the inner north we want our young people to stay; we do not want to push them out.
We want our schoolteachers, our bus drivers, our nurses, our hospo workers, our creatives, the people who make us a community to be able to build a life in our suburbs, to have choice and opportunity and stability.
That means more quality homes. It means investing in new health services, better schools, quality open spaces and easier transport.
That is exactly what Labor is focused on delivering – giving Victorians more homes, more choice and more opportunity – and we are doing that right now in our suburbs.
We have a train and tram zone in Thornbury, and it will deliver more homes for our community gradually over time. Coupled with those homes will be investment into our schools, into our transport networks and into our parks and public spaces – the things that make our suburbs thrive.
But we cannot accept a policy that pushes young people, millennials and anyone who is disadvantaged out of our suburbs onto the urban fringe.
That is not a policy, that is a disaster.
That is not a plan for the future and it is not something that we can or should accept.
It does not speak to equity.
It does not speak to fairness.
We want to give Victorians more hope and more opportunity.
We want to make their lives easier.
The unholy alliance of Liberal and Greens blockers needs to do some serious soul-searching and stop ripping housing options away from Victorians.
That is it.
