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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-28 Daily Xml
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Housing Supply

Ms SAVVAS (Newland) (14:25): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on how the Malinauskas Labor government is helping to get more South Australians into their own homes sooner?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (14:25): We have spoken much about this subject over a period of time—including, I know, from the member for Newland, who is particularly enthusiastic about maintaining a degree of affordability. She has seen demographic changes in her own community with a lot of young people moving in because the north-eastern suburbs of our state is a good place to live, with a pretty good sense of community, but affordability remains a challenge.

The truth is that there are silver-bullet solutions out in the marketplace for the housing crisis, but if they don't create supply they don't make a difference. In fact, there are plenty of ideas out there that don't create supply but do create demand, and what that in turn does is makes the problem worse. It makes the problem worse. In fact, if you increase demand for an existing amount of supply—say if you incentivise more people to bid on an existing home—the only winner out of that is a vendor, which is why for the life of me—

The Hon. D.G. Pisoni: So the 5 per cent deposit is no good, then? Albanese's 5 per cent deposit is no good? Is that what you're saying: it's a disaster?

The SPEAKER: The member for Unley can leave the chamber until the end of question time.

The honourable member for Unley having withdrawn from the chamber:

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS: We can dissect distinctions in policy between those who want to create demand and those who want to create supply all day, but what we have announced recently on the weekend is yet another policy specifically oriented towards getting more supply. We have obviously already done a lot in regard to the urban growth of metropolitan Adelaide, which in and of itself isn't all easy. There are costs associated with that, which we acknowledge, but we believe that families who want a backyard should have that opportunity, which is why we are funding water connections in particular—opposed by those opposite in no small way.

But we also want to provide the option of going up in our CBD. We believe the city should be able to grow up and out at the same time if we are sincere about wanting to address the supply constraints. In our city we have a challenge, though. There is a degree of market failure when it comes to the financing of apartment buildings. Apartment buildings that are at the luxe end—the million-dollar apartments with the magnificent views and so forth—get built, and that's great because it might be a downsizing option for people who own a home elsewhere.

But for young people trying to enter into the market, we don't see apartment buildings getting built at more affordable price points: that $540,000-odd range which is the affordable price point and up to $1 million. We just don't see that. One of the reasons for that is that developers can't get the adequate pre-sales in that end of the market, because if you're a first-home buyer you're inclined to buy something you can see.

So we have partnered with industry to come up with a very substantial policy to unlock that pre-commitment: half a billion dollars on the table by the South Australian government, in effect providing the pre-commitment at that affordable price point. What that allows for is for a developer to get what is—in the case of over 2,000 apartment dwellings—already approved out of the ground and built up. When you layer on top of that an extraordinary piece of work from the minister to engage with Adelaide Airport to go block by block by block throughout the CBD and unlock a new height limit in conjunction with the Airport, that expedites the approval process. Again, there is not one solution here that makes a difference but a whole range of policies that add up and they are coming together to make us the number one state in the country when it comes to housing growth.

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