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The Property Council of Australia (PCA) has appealed to Parliament to approve the federal government’s housing legislation, emphasising that passage of the reform “should not take a double dissolution election”.
Ahead of the reintroduction of the legislation to Federal Parliament this week, the Property Council of Australia has called for members of Parliament to pass the federal government’s housing legislation, starting with the Help to Buy bill, through both houses of Parliament.
The council’s request comes after the Greens and the Coalition’s move in mid-September to delay a vote on the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. With the delay taken as a rejection, a second failure to pass the measure could hand the Prime Minister the power to call for a double dissolution of Parliament that would see both parliamentary houses dissolved so a federal election can occur.
While a double dissolution is deemed unlikely, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil commented late last week that the scenario should be considered a “serious proposition”.
It’s a particular threat to the Senate, as a double dissolution sees every seat in that house up for re-election, as opposed to the usual half.
With Australia currently building only 160,000 homes annually, far short of the 240,000 needed to meet the national Housing Accord target of 1.2 million homes by 2029, Property Council chief executive Mike Zorbas stressed that the “longer we wait to pass housing legislation the longer the housing crisis drags on”.
“These last few sitting weeks of the year are the right time to sideline entrenched political views and pass legislation to build more homes and get more Australians onto the property ladder,” he said.
While the chief executive acknowledged that neither of the housing bills are a “silver bullet”, he was emphatic that the implementation of housing reform “should not take a double dissolution election” and stressed that the government is already “decades behind” in supplying the housing that the country needs.
“The Property Council, Community Housing Industry Association and National Shelter have put forward a build-to-rent proposal to create 105,000 additional rental homes over the next decade, 10 per cent of which would be affordable.”
“We need bipartisan support to fix the legislation before the Senate and unlock massive additional investment in rental housing at a time when the supply of new apartments is at half of 2017 levels,” he concluded.
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