Minister Collins interview on Today

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

HOST: We are joined now by the Minister for Housing, Julie Collins, who joins us from beautiful Hobart. Good morning to us, Julie. Can you talk us through these changes to the Home Guarantee Scheme and how they will work?

JULIE COLLINS, MINISTER FOR HOUSING: Yeah, what we’re doing here is widening the eligibility criteria. What we want to do is support more Australians to get into a home, particularly those who have been long term renting, those who are having difficulty overcoming the 20 per cent mortgage deposit threshold. What they can do through this scheme is with as little as 5 per cent deposit, they can get into homeownership sooner. We’ll save them tens of thousands of dollars, because they won’t need lenders mortgage insurance, because the government will guarantee that other 15 per cent of the deposit. We have expanded the criteria. We’re saying that no longer are we talking about just a couple or a de facto, because we know of course that things are changing. We’re having friends, siblings, all types of people going into homeownership right across Australia today, and we need to move with the times. And we need to accept that different people are doing different things to get into homeownership, and that’s what today’s changes are about.

We also importantly for single parents are going to allow them to be eligible for the scheme. We’ve had some cases of children who are in foster care, who are nephews and nieces for instance being looked after by aunties and uncles who didn’t make the exact criteria of this scheme. So we’re taking the opportunity to widen scheme to allow them eligibility as well.

HOST: Do you think this will help address Australia’s housing crisis? Or do you think there’s a danger that it could help, it could drive prices up even higher if more people become eligible for homeownership?

COLLINS: What we’re doing with this scheme is we’re targeting it. We’re capping the number, so there’s 50,000 places across the Home Guarantee Scheme across the country in the year. We’re having price caps on it. What we don’t want to do is impact prices, but obviously we do want to get and support Australians into homeownership sooner. This, of course, is also just part of the suite of reforms we’re doing as a government. We of course with the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee, we bought that forward. We’ve got more Australians into homes in regional Australia faster. We, of course, have our Housing Australia Future Fund. The $10 billion fund, that was the centrepiece that we took to the last election, that is currently before the Senate where the returns of that fund each year been investing in social and affordable rental homes in the country. We know we have a supply issue. We want to work with states and territories to address supply. We’re also doing that through our National Housing Accord, which of course is another 10,000 affordable rentals from the Commonwealth. And of course, the states have agreed to match that from 1 July 2024. And we’re talking there an aspiration of a million homes over five years across the country, homes of all types.

So we do have a broad suite of policies. We’ve also immediately unlocked $575 million, and we’ve already made announcements and we’re already seeing construction underway on new social and affordable rentals across Australia because we acted immediately. So we have short term, medium term and long term plans when it comes to trying to turn this housing situation around in Australia. What I would say though, of course, is to Liberal senators and the Greens senators at the moment – our $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund Bill is in the Senate and I would say to them they need to support this if they’re serious about supporting Australians into homeownership sooner.

HOST: Well as Housing Minister and a Tasmanian, how do you feel about the Prime Minister visiting Tassie yesterday with $240 million to spend and spending it on a footy Stadium and not say, you know, more social housing?

COLLINS: Well, of course, we are building more social and affordable homes here in Tasmania as part of the announcement yesterday. We managed to secure from the state government a commitment – around 130 houses we’re talking about here, a mixture of tenures including social homes, including homes for some of the health workers that work at the hospital nearby. Affordable homes. We, of course, are working with the Tasmanian state government also. And if the Housing Australia Future Fund, once that gets through the Senate, there’ll be additional homes coming here to Tasmania and of course right across the country. We’re talking about 30,000 in the first five years of that fund across the country of new social and affordable rental homes. So we are working right across the country, but also here in Tasmania, to try and turn around the housing challenges that we’ve inherited after a decade of very little being done by the former government.

HOST: Okay, Minister Julie Collins, thank you so much for your time this morning.

ENDS