I find myself outnumbered here, but we’ll have a go anyway! I will take up a point from the previous speaker, the member for Adelaide. Groom must be a very different place. We saw tremendous investment in our energy sector across coal, gas and solar. Just outside wind, we’re energy agnostic; we’ll take whatever works, and we get on with the job up there.
I come to this place, as I’m sure many of my colleagues from all sides do, to make the world a better place and to hope the next generation have more opportunities and better quality of life than our generation experienced. Quite simply put, I want a better Australia. We’re all here to do that. That’s what our job is. This includes, for me, very much keeping the great Australian dream alive. The idea of being able to buy and own your own home—this is an important part of what you can do, why people come to our country, what makes us a special place, that that dream is still alive. And I want to keep it there. But right now, for so many young people, particularly in Groom, that dream is either unobtainable or, for those who have just got onto the property ladder, a weight that’s almost too much to bear.
Prior to the election the Prime Minister acknowledged this, and that’s why he made his promise of cheaper mortgages. It was a very good promise to make; nowhere more so than in Groom was it a good promise to make, because prior to the election we were regularly reported as having the most financial stress amongst mortgage holders of anywhere in the nation. We’ve been growing. It’s a place where people invest and get ahead; I made the analogy before with our energy markets. We want to get in and have a go. We take that risk. Unfortunately, with that has come stress. That was true before the election, when the Prime Minister made his promise of cheaper mortgages, and it is true after the election. Since then, the number of mortgage holders experiencing financial stress has gone from 40 per cent before the election to 73 per cent now. Things have gotten a lot worse, particularly for a lot of young people who are just in the property market or for people looking to get into the property market. Sadly, that great Australian dream of homeownership is slipping away.
When the Prime Minister promised lower mortgages, Australians believed him and wanted him to succeed in that promise. I’m not giving up on that dream; I’m sad that the Prime Minister is. But, as parochial as I am for my great region, it’s not just in Groom that this is being experienced. This is from a Roy Morgan report from yesterday: mortgage stress increased to its highest level since September 2011, with 25.3 per cent of mortgage holders now ‘at risk’. It estimates 1.23 million mortgage holders were at risk of mortgage stress in the three months to February 2023. That number has increased by 514,000 over the last year. That’s an extraordinary increase.
It was a great promise to make. I think this is where we’ve come to. This is not a joke; this is a very important promise the Prime Minister has walked away from. Prior to the election this side of the House made the announcement of the Super Home Buyer Scheme, which would allow first home buyers to use their superannuation to purchase a property. That was a commitment we made because we recognised, like the Prime Minister, that mortgage stress was a huge issue and that the great Australian dream needed to be kept alive. We acknowledged that and made that commitment. I’m very proud to say that after the election we’ve kept the commitment; Peter Dutton has maintained that commitment we made before the election. I’m reminded of the great Seinfeld episode about the hire car—you took the booking but you didn’t hold the booking. This is the thing with commitments: you’ve got to make them and then hold them on the other side of the election. Those opposite haven’t held their commitment, and it’s important that the Australian people understand that.
To the young people of Groom, I will be very clear: I want you to own a home. I want you to get on the property ladder. I want that dream to be alive for you. And, unlike the Prime Minister, we will keep our commitment to work towards that dream. I think there’s nothing more important in Australia right now than to see young people coming through and owning their own homes. This is not a joke. This is not a laughing matter. It’s a very important issue for us to be talking about. We’ve been talking about it for a fair while now, and we’re going to keep talking about it. Members opposite, I know you’re going to hear this over and over again: these broken promises are hurting the Australian people.
