Housing Affordability

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (15:33): I would like to take this opportunity today to talk about housing. We know the pressures of the housing market are being felt right across the country, including here in South Australia. Median house prices have grown in excess of 80 per cent in our state in the past five years, while rents have increased by 6 per cent in the past year alone. For too many South Australians, saving for a deposit while paying today's rents feels impossible. But the Malinauskas government is not standing idly by in the face of a housing crisis. We are pulling every lever, taking every opportunity we can to help more South Australians buy their own homes.

While we work to address housing affordability, it is really important to be honest about what is and what is not causing the problem. While friends of those opposite continue to point the finger at migrants and international students, this government will not scapegoat other people for a problem that has been decades in the making. Let me be clear: migrants and international students are not to blame for rising house prices or rent pressures. Housing affordability challenges are the result of years of underinvestment in supply and planning, the systemic destruction of vocational education and training, and wage stagnation unable to keep up with the cost of living.

Those opposite do not want first-home buyers to point the finger at the person buying their 20^th property: they want them to point the finger at the fellow Australian trying to buy their first. Migrants have made and continue to make an enormous contribution to our state's economy, our health system and our community. They are the nurses staffing our hospitals, the engineers designing new infrastructure and the small business owners breathing life into our suburbs. They deserve and need somewhere to live too.

The Malinauskas government will continue working every day to solve the housing crisis by building more homes, not by building walls. Our focus is on accelerating construction, unlocking land and supporting all South Australians, whether they were born here or chose to make this state their home, to share in the opportunity and security that housing provides. Since our election, we have committed $3 billion in housing-related projects, investing in building more homes, creating new jobs and relieving pressure in a tight housing market.

In the 2025-26 state budget alone, we allocated more than $550 million to support the construction of almost 3,000 new homes to help vulnerable South Australians find secure housing. This builds on our earlier reform to remove property value thresholds for first-home buyer stamp duty relief and the First Home Owner Grant, providing eligible first-home buyers in South Australia as much as $55,000 in relief towards a new home. We have also released our Housing Roadmap, a comprehensive plan to increase supply as quickly as possible by supporting rezonings for close to 40,000 new homes, investing $1.2 billion in critical water and wastewater infrastructure and reforming planning laws to cut approval times almost in half.

We have learned from the mistakes of those opposite and Labor governments of the past to stop sales, fast-track construction and deliver necessary upgrades to provide an additional 4,817 public homes in South Australia by 2026. We are investing in the workforce needed to build these homes, including through the establishment of the technical college in Tonsley, in my electorate, that opens next year. It is not just first-home buyers and public housing tenants: we have also provided renters with greater protections, too, by banning rent bidding, making bonds more affordable, and protecting tenant rights and personal information.

Housing affordability is one of the defining challenges of our generation. No single program or initiative will solve it overnight. We need to build more homes, and we need a skilled workforce to build those homes. The Malinauskas government will not divide South Australians when we should be building with them.