Housing Crisis

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (15:25): When it comes to housing, the government has been talking the talk without walking the walk. It has made grand announcements about land releases, a Housing Roadmap and a review into the public housing maintenance contracts, without producing the housing people need.

South Australia has a housing affordability crisis that is only getting worse under the Malinauskas Labor government. It spent the summer cherrypicking approvals data and talking about housing developments that will not be completed for years, instead of delivering real relief for South Australians. The most recent dwelling commencement data out of the ABS shows that dwelling commencements are coming in consistently lower than the five-year average, and this government does not want metrics because they do not want to be held accountable.

There has been a lot of commentary about how federal Labor's Housing Accord is in tatters: a promise of 1.2 million homes over five years translating to 84,000 houses in South Australia, or nearly 17,000 per annum, from the years 2024-25 through until 2028-29. The clock is ticking and what we know from the government so far is that, 'We don't have much detail about that, other than what the federal government has said publicly. They have not engaged us with any specific amounts.' That is neglect.

We have no target for how many houses should be built in South Australia, even though over 95 per cent of homes are built by the private sector, there is no target for how many skilled building and construction workers are needed in South Australia and there are no targets for the volumes of construction materials we need to ensure that home building remains cost competitive. In housing, as in everything else in life, if you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

If we turn to the record land release of February 2023, when will those first homes be built? We know that in February 2023, Labor announced the sites which are to accommodate new housing. Before making the announcement, Labor ministers did not even bother to check critical infrastructure capacity, particularly SA Water's water and sewerage network. This is important information because it signals whether one of the major elements in being able to start construction is there.

Two years down the track, infrastructure deeds have only just been signed for the Onkaparinga Heights site, which was the most development-ready of those four sites. The minister himself has conceded that building on the site will not start until 2026 at the earliest, which is a full three years since the grandiose announcement.

During the entirety of its term, the Malinauskas government will not have built a single home on its proclaimed land release sites. A number of building sites featured in Labor press releases are products of Marshall government decisions, which my colleague the member for Colton outlined today, but the list of Peter Malinauskas' government housing fails keeps growing.

It delayed by three years the Marshall government's renewal program at Seaton, letting public housing tenants languish in poor housing and leading to costly delays for those builds which will be borne by subsequent home owners. It has axed our extension of the emergency domestic and family violence accommodation program from 31 to 100 beds, which we announced in February 2022. It has failed to develop an alternative emergency hotel and motel accommodation program based on the successful DV crisis program. It failed to pay tradies for work done on public housing, while delaying repairs for tenants. It failed to develop a model for those in hotels to access private rental assistance.

It has delayed major developments at Bowden and Aldinga by 12 months, causing costly delays for those builds, which will be borne by home owners. It has delayed South Australia's first build-to-rent project, 140 apartments at Park Court at Eastwood. It ignored the pleas of HomeBuilder recipients who were about to lose their new builds. It outbid local builders for sites at the West End Brewery and the Franklin Street bus depot. It has cost local builders who had bid for those hundreds of thousands of dollars, driving some of them out of South Australia.

It did not check with SA Water before rushing to announce greenfield sites, and it is pushing up water prices in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis for water infrastructure. The Premier said, when he announced his road map, that he was shocked about the lack of capacity for SA Water to provide housing. He said this on the ABC:

…at some point someone's got to pay to put some pipes in the ground so homes can get connected, and we've been kicking this can down the road over a sustained period and those days have got to come to an end…

This contrasts with an SA Water official who said, 'We have been gearing up for this amount of growth for a very long time,' when questioned about the SA Water network at Budget and Finance. I will have more to say on these matters in future.