Housing Supply

Mr TELFER (Flinders) (14:17): My question is to the Minister for Housing and Urban Development. Has the minister sought or received advice or modelling from his agency on whether South Australia will meet its housing targets under the National Housing Accord? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TELFER: Data released by Master Builders Australia in early April suggests that South Australia will underperform a target to construct 83,000 new homes by 2028-29 in accordance with the National Housing Accord targets by 33 per cent or 27,000 homes.

The Hon. N.D. CHAMPION (Taylor—Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Minister for Housing Infrastructure, Minister for Planning) (14:18): We are going to do everything we can to expand supply into the market and everything we can to facilitate private industry and public agencies delivering on housing targets, not because it's a target but because we want to, as the Premier says, provide homes to South Australians.

I guess it's important to realise that there is a timeline to these things, that it does take time. Rezoning takes time. Councils take a lot of time with land division. It takes time to do civil works, it takes time to put infrastructure in. Of course, that means the pipeline has to be put in place by each and every government to make sure there is supply into the market. I noticed the Leader of the Opposition on ABC radio said:

I don't think when we were in government we necessarily got the land release side of things right and the availability of land for housing is a big problem around Adelaide and in the regions as well.

What has happened is, after four years of doing next to nothing on housing—next to nothing on housing in the city, next to nothing on housing in the suburbs and next to nothing on housing in the regions—the opposition shows up and says, 'Why can't you just click your fingers and produce houses?' The answer is because you clogged up the pipeline. You clogged up the pipeline on land release and you clogged up the pipeline on infrastructure, and you should own up to it.

What we are doing is putting land supply into the system. As I said before, there are over 90 code amendments with over 4,000 hectares in the system currently being assessed for land release. That is an unrivalled level of activity in our planning system to provide supply into both the public arena and the private arena—important projects like Onkaparinga Heights, Hackham, Concordia, Sellicks Beach, Dry Creek, the former brewery, Prospect Corner, Bowden—

Mr Telfer interjecting:

The Hon. N.D. CHAMPION: —let me finish off—all these things are important. I hear the member's intervention; I say there's no time like today to begin, and the difference between us and you is that we have begun.