Short-stay accommodation
Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (14:26): My question is to the Premier. Premier, we are in a housing crisis. The Premier has been on the record talking about needing more housing supply. There are currently over 48,000 whole investment homes listed on Airbnb in Victoria – 48,000 homes which could house a renter or a first home buyer or a family. Instead they are being used to maximise profits for investors and for the Airbnb corporation and to inflate property prices. Labor’s policy is to put a tax on bookings, which today’s PBO report shows would only have a marginal impact on the issue, whereas regulation could free up 13,000 homes for long-term residents. Will Labor commit to properly regulating Airbnb to actually make thousands of homes available for people to live in?
The SPEAKER: I ask the member for Melbourne to rephrase her question to make it in relation to government as opposed to a party.
Ellen SANDELL: Will the government commit to properly regulating Airbnb to actually make thousands more homes available for people to live in?
Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:27): I thank the member for Melbourne for her question and acknowledge her elevation as Leader of the Greens political party following the resignation of the member in the other place. In terms of the critical issue of addressing housing supply, we are using every single lever we have available to us as a government to build more homes. The work that the Treasurer has been doing in looking at areas like the short-stay levy and looking at how homes that may previously have been available on the rental market are now being used to support our tourism industry is an area of that work, but that is not the magic solution that the Greens political party may be seeking. The solution is looking at all of the levers we need to use, including the parliamentary levers that we have, to support more homes.
Blocking the development of more homes, blocking housing opportunities, is not the way to do that. I had hoped and I continue to hope – we have not had the chance to have a conversation yet – that with a change of leader in the Greens political party we might see a change of approach and, instead of not supporting the building of more homes, using parliamentary mechanisms to block and stop the building of more homes and seeing how in council chambers around the state the Greens political party are not supporting housing opportunities, that we have a new approach. I am still hopeful that we will get a new approach from the member for Melbourne, because we have heard from the member for Melbourne how she wants to see more homes being built. That is what the government wants to achieve, but we do not achieve that by standing in the way of developments across the state; we do it by building more homes.
I am reminded that recently we were in Mount Waverley. The Minister for Housing, the member for Ashwood and I were in Mount Waverley where we got to see a fantastic development supporting women, particularly with a focus on women over the age of 55 – the single fastest growing group of Australians experiencing or at risk of homelessness. It is a fantastic development – 96 brand new, modern and secure apartments for women over the age of 55. You would have thought this is a project that everyone would have got on board with. Sadly, no, in this instance the Liberal Party did not support this development and actively campaigned against it.
We will continue to push on and look at what we can do – every lever – but we need councils, we need the federal government and we need those of us in Parliament to get on with the task of building more homes.
Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (14:31): I note the Premier wants to build more homes and yet her party’s policy is to demolish all the public housing in Victoria. Anyway, when we are talking about using every lever, major cities around the world – Berlin, Amsterdam, London – have all introduced caps and restrictions on the number of days a short stay can be listed on platforms like Airbnb. Even WA announced a similar policy just this week. These caps stop property investors buying up homes and taking them away from renters or owner-occupiers, whereas the Parliamentary Budget Office, an independent body, has said that the levy that the government has proposed will have a marginal impact on the housing crisis. Why won’t Labor follow their WA colleagues and introduce regulation of Airbnb that will actually bring thousands more homes onto the long-term market?
Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:32): It is the same question. I only have a minute as opposed to 3 minutes to provide the same answer to the same question that I was given in the substantive question. I simply repeat that there is not one magic solution to building more homes in Victoria – and it is not even the main solution, member for Melbourne. Rather than looking at the margins, we are looking at what we can do in making substantial change, which is why the work of the planning minister, for example, is so important and the work of the development facilitation program, which now has tens of thousands of homes in the process that were not there previously, before we introduced this policy. There are so many levers that we are pulling to build more homes for more Victorians, and I look forward to the support from the member for Melbourne and the Greens political party in this task.