ANDREW BRAGG: It’s time Labor looked at practical solutions to help fix Australia’s growing housing crisis

Housing is one of the major issues facing Australia. Almost everyone knows someone who wants to buy a house but they can’t.

A feeling of helplessness is taking over for millions of Australians.

Opinion poll after opinion polls shows that younger Australians in particular feel they will never own a home.

If this fear materialises, Australia will never be the same. We will cede our claim to be one the world’s greatest home-owning nations.

In some ways, the dread is understandable as Australia has drifted under Labor Government’s housing policies for the past three years.

There are two key numbers which show how bad things have become under Labor: the number of houses built and the time taken to get to a deposit.

Firstly, the numbers on housing construction don’t lie.

New Parliamentary Library research shows that during the nine years of Coalition government more than 192,500 new dwellings were completed annually. This peaked at around 220,000 in a single year.

Since Labor came to power, the number of new dwelling completions has plummeted to 174,000 annually.

The nation needs 250,000 houses to be built each year and Labor has us running in the wrong direction.

During this time, Labor has brought in more than one million new migrants without considering the impact this would have on the housing market.

They have built bureaucracy, not houses.

What I mean by this, is that instead of getting shovels in the ground, Labor has been giving money to bureaucratic agencies and passing this off as housing measures.

They aren’t.

Labor has committed more than $10 billion to social and affordable housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund. Yet, not a single home has been delivered under this scheme.

Last September, Labor’s Housing Minister Clare O’Neil released a statement with the Prime Minister claiming that 13,742 new homes had been approved under the HAFF.

Last week, Housing Australia announced that 12 contracts had been signed for 810 new dwellings.

That’s 12,932 fewer than Labor promised just five months ago.

It is mind-boggling that the Prime Minister would announce these new houses back in September before contracts were signed, let alone shovels entering the ground.

Labor is big on announcements but bad at building.

Labor is in Government — they control the public service. If they believed that housing is such a big issue, they would direct the public service to deliver all the homes promised.

To date this has not happened.

This again highlights the craziness of expecting bureaucracy to deliver houses.

Secondly, the Australian Dream is further from reach than ever.

Not only has the Albanese Government failed to lay the groundwork on the supply side but they have also failed on the demand side.

Action is needed on the demand side specifically to help prospective first home owners enter and stay in the housing market.

A comparison of Corelogic’s data on the time it takes prospective first home owners to save for a first home deposit shows an increase in almost every capital city.

Here in Sydney, there has been an 11-month increase since the election, with Sydneysiders now saving for 12.5 years for their first home deposit.

Nationally, there has been a 14-month increase with it now taking 9.4 years to save for a first home deposit.

Labor’s solution is “Help to Buy”.

Australians are hungry for housing solutions which work. It is therefore galling to see Ms O’Neil kick off the new year spruiking a policy in which most houses are ineligible. Help to Buy is a cruel hoax.

Ms O’Neil’s social media posts from January this year clearly show freestanding houses which will never fit into the scheme.

Based on new Corelogic data, most houses in every capital city bar Darwin do not fit into the Help to Buy scheme. In Sydney, only 14 per cent of houses fit into the scheme. In Perth, just 7 per cent of the houses are eligible and in Adelaide it’s only 6 per cent.

State-based co-ownership schemes have seen low take up, because inherently, Australians don’t want to co-own their home with the government.

The NSW Shared Equity Home Buyer Helper pilot program was a complete failure. An analysis of the NSW scheme found that it fell 94 per cent short of its approval goals.

Help to Buy has failed before, and it will fail again.

Labor should look at practical solutions to build houses like fast tracking infrastructure and allowing people to use their own money in super for a deposit.

These are already Coalition policies because we know how to get housing back on track.

Andrew Bragg is shadow assistant minister for home ownership