I'm so thrilled to be with you, Harry.

I'm a huge fan of this publication, so lovely to talk to you.

We love to hear it.

So, we hear time and time again that Australia is in a housing crisis.

What does that actually mean?

Well, what it means is that we have more or less millions of people in our country for whom housing is a life-defining challenge.

I'm thinking there about young people who are lining up in rental queues on a Saturday outbidding each other for a property that they may not even want to live in.

It's people who've bought in really high house prices, high mortgages, who are in a cost of living crisis, struggling to be able to look after their families properly.

And perhaps most concerningly at all, it's that increasing number of people in our country who are actually falling out of the bottom of the housing market altogether into homelessness.

So these problems have been building and building in our country really for about 30 years now.

And our government, the Albanese government, is really stepping up and trying to do something significant about this problem.

You just mentioned young people there.

Can you explain why this generation is going to be worse off than their parents when it comes to housing?

Well, I don't think we should quite wave the white flag on that just yet.

I think young people are going through some horrendous difficulties with housing.

And the people that I'm most worried about when I look at what's going on in the housing market are absolutely young people.

What I want young people to know is that for the first time in my lifetime, we have a Commonwealth government and state governments and local governments right around the country who are urgently trying to address some issues that frankly should have been dealt with decades ago but weren't.

And it's going to take a little bit of time for us to address them.

But I don't think that takes away at all from the problems that young people are experiencing today.

They're very real and trust me, I'm talking to young people about that all the time.

So you've set out the problem there.

I just want to have a look at some of the solutions that the government's putting on the table, maybe starting with home ownership.

Your main policy in this area is called Help to Buy.

Can you just briefly explain what that is?

We have a few specific things that we're offering to first home owners.

One of those is Help to Buy, as you mentioned.

So this is a scheme that will assist 40,000 people to get into the housing market.

It's targeted at people who are the people who are locked out at the moment, our childcare workers, disability workers, other people who are on kind of medium or lower incomes.

So that's a scheme that will affect 40,000 people.

How does that bring down house prices?

Because that helps people put down a deposit, but does it actually address the root cause of escalating prices when it comes to housing?

Yeah.

So no, it doesn't.

And it's not targeted at bringing down house prices.

The biggest problem that we have, and if there's one thing that your listeners take from this discussion about housing, it should be this.

The reason we have a housing crisis in our country is because we haven't been building enough homes.

So that's why you're seeing that really unsustainable house price growth, especially in some cities where there's huge pressure, like Perth, for example, is one area where house prices have gone up very, very, very high.

The home ownership stuff is work that we are doing that gives people some immediate assistance to get into the housing market.

We're not going to fix the house price problem in our country overnight.

What we can do is make sure we're using our government supports to help young people get into the housing market.

So just drilling into some of the policy specifics, you mentioned that this help to buy scheme will help 40,000 people over four years.

The Greens have criticized this as being a terrible policy because it effectively creates a lottery system.

Do you agree that it's a lottery?

No, because the scheme has yet to start.

So it starts next year, it'll be 10,000 places a year, and it won't be a lottery scheme.

It will be first come, first serve, and we'll see what that demand looks like.

But if I can just say very respectfully, I mean, the way the Greens have behaved in the housing debate hasn't been fantastic.

A shared equity scheme, which is what help to buy is, was part of their platform going into the 2022 election.

And they then held up our government from setting up a shared equity scheme for a really long period of time.

And that's had real consequences.

We would have been able to start that scheme in the middle of this year, 2024, and it's been delayed.

Respectfully, I'd love to hear from other people who've got different points of view, but I'm not sure we've seen the best behavior from the Greens on this one.

TDA did a bit of a call out when we announced that we would be interviewing the housing minister.

And the number one thing that they came back with was negative gearing.

What's your position on changing negative gearing?

My position is this.

I want people to understand the reason that we have a housing crisis is because we haven't been building enough homes.

With respect, Minister, we will get to supply.

And I definitely want to ask you more about the government's plans to build more homes.

No, no, I know.

And the reason I'm pointing that out, Harry, is because every policy that we have, we assess from that lens.

Is it going to help us build more homes?

I think you'd be aware that our government looked at changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax.

And we couldn't clearly show that there weren't going to be supply issues created by that.

And so we decided not to progress with changes on negative gearing and capital gains tax.

Our policies are, we're trying to address those major supply issues, help renters get a better deal and help more Australians into home ownership.

And those are the focus for the moment.

And I just say also, Harry, my party took negative gearing changes to two elections and the Australian people said, well, you didn't get elected.

We didn't get to make those changes.

So we've moved on from that debate.

We're now focused on the things that are really going to make a difference and that's building more homes.

So voters have rejected it at two previous elections.

Does this mean that the government will never look at changing negative gearing ever again?

It's just not the focus and it's not being looked at at the moment.

And I mean, obviously I can't say what a government in 10 or 20 years time might do, but it's certainly not something that's being considered by our government.

Not in the next five or 10 years?

It's not something that's being considered by the government and the government's had a look at it and we've moved on.

Moving on to renting, the Australian dream has always been to own your own home.

Many people listening today will be in a category of people known as forever renters because they have given up on that dream.

What's your message to them?

Well, I don't want them to give up on that dream.

I think it's perfectly normal to rent when you're young and you're moving around and you don't want to have big financial obligations, but certainly the aspiration of our government is not to just consider that that dream's going to end with this generation of young people.

We're genuinely really concerned about the idea that young people feel that they're never going to get into home ownership.

And so the government is doing everything we can to reshape that.

The building more homes, making sure that when you are renting, that you're in a stable and secure place, that you're not getting kicked out or treated badly like your landlord.

And then also that work that we're doing to try to help get more young people into home ownership.

Now, we're having a conversation here and you're putting the appropriate amounts of pressure on me as you should do as a journalist, but I just say to people listening at home, you know, the Commonwealth has not stepped up on housing for a long, long time in this country and you do have a Commonwealth government that's stepping in, states that are really working at this and trying to address all of those barriers that are creating those problems at the moment.

And we are going to see change that results from that.

Looking at the cost of renting, I think a lot of people listening today don't need to be reminded that renting is just getting more and more expensive.

The average cost in the capital cities is $650 and the average cost in the regions is $550.

I know that this is a state issue, but as the country's housing minister, do you want to see caps on rent increases?

Absolutely not.

So firstly, renters are doing it really, really tough and if there was a single thing that we could do to fix all the problems that renters are experiencing, then I would absolutely be up for that, but it's not that simple.

So I don't support rent caps and, you know, if you bring some experts onto the show and talk to them, you'll get a really consistent answer out of them.

Economists in the world agree on almost nothing, but almost all of them agree that rent caps is ultimately going to create really, really serious problems.

So people will stop building homes, they will stop offering their homes for renters, they will create conditions where rentals become completely rundown and atrocious to live in and basically we're not going to have a functioning housing market anymore.

So this is just the consequence of rent caps.

It's why that, you know, rent caps are reasonably rare when you look at what's going on around the world.

The ACT has them.

Do you think that those dire circumstances where you're left with poorly kept rentals, do you think that that's happening in the ACT?

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Thank you so much.

And back to the video.

I mean, it's probably not happening in the ACT and I'm not sure what the exact policy structure they have for, you know, the way that they're managing rentals there.

And as you say, this is a state issue, so not actually something I have control over, but I just say generally rent caps are a really bad idea.

So there are other forms of rental protections though, and that could include capping the number of times that rents increase in a single year.

Is that something you're supportive of?

It is, and that is something that the government is pursuing through national cabinet.

So renter rights are managed by state governments.

That's a constitutional thing that renters rights are managed by state governments.

So our government doesn't want to tap out of it.

What we're trying to do is work with the state premiers to make consistent changes around the country to make renting a better experience.

So one of those is only allowing for one rental increase a year.

Another one of those is not allowing for no-fault evictions.

So people can't get kicked out of their rental property unless they've actually done something wrong, something to, you know, that would create problems for the landlord.

So these are being pursued through national cabinet.

What has to happen is one of the just complexities of my work.

When the states own these powers, they have to actually go through and legislate those changes state by state, and the states are working through that at the moment.

So you've mentioned supply a few times now.

I just want to ask about the government's plans to actually build more homes.

Can you just talk me through what the federal government is doing in this space?

Yeah.

So I've said a couple of times, the biggest issue that we face here is that we don't have enough housing and we haven't been building enough housing over a long period of time.

So when we look at how many houses we have per head of population, per thousand people living in our country, our rates are quite a bit below other countries that we compare ourselves to.

And that just reflects all those housing pressures that people are feeling.

So the answer to this is to build more homes.

So we've sat down with the state governments and said, we are going to, as a group, try to build 1.2 million homes over the coming five years.

So this is work that the states have got to do around changing planning and zoning laws.

It's about making sure that we've got more construction workers in our country.

It's about providing funding where that's appropriate.

The Commonwealth is building, for example, 55,000 social and affordable homes as part of that bid to get to 1.2 million.

So it's basically everyone trying to do everything that they can to build more homes as a country.

And that's the first time this has happened really since the post-war period that we've all tried to come together like that.

The coalition says that migration is impacting supply.

What are your reflections on that argument?

Well, I agree that migration has a part in this discussion.

Of course it does, because the number of people living in our country is a driver of how many houses we need.

It's really important not to exaggerate that and politicise it, though, and that's probably some of the concerns I have with the debate at the moment.

We had a little bit of a real-time experiment of what happens to housing when our population goes down, as it did during COVID, when a lot of people who were temporary migrants in our country left Australia, and house prices absolutely went through the roof.

So I don't think you can categorically say that migration is the cause of all of these problems.

However, migration has been high post-COVID, and our government is reducing migration basically back to normal levels, and that will help over time.

So now that the government's two key pieces of legislation has passed that's helped buy and build to rent in the final sitting fortnight, what's next?

So it's been a really big week for housing.

As you mentioned, we've got two of these really important pieces of the puzzle from our perspective through the Senate.

What's next is a big push on implementation.

So for a lot of your listeners, they probably see government sort of debating these things and all that sort of thing, and then they switch off a little bit when legislation passes.

My job as minister now is to actually execute these policies and make sure all these programs are set up and helping the people that need to be helped.

So yeah, that's the big focus for me.

And then of course, if no one's heard yet, we've got an election coming pretty soon, so there'll be a bit of work there too.