Page 3346 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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financial support of social housing, that that was a state and territory responsibility. That is very clear. That is what has changed, Mr Parton. Zed Seselja was a casualty of that along the way. He was an added bonus, from my perspective, but it is not just the housing issue that was the undoing of former Senator Seselja. There might have been a few other issues. Housing was amongst them, but it was not the only one. I think we all know that, and we all know the reasons why.
We are seeking to work constructively with the commonwealth Treasurer, the commonwealth finance minister and the federal Minister for Housing on the delivery of a clearly stated election commitment. We look forward to some further announcements in relation to that between now and the federal budget. We will work in partnership with the commonwealth to deliver more diverse and affordable housing options. This is entirely consistent with the parliamentary and governing agreement, which outlines the territory government’s commitment to improve social housing and housing affordability, to continue to grow and renew social housing and to increase affordable housing supply.
What we have in 2022, 2023, 2024 and, hopefully, 2025 and beyond, is both the territory government and the federal government willing to work together to provide financial resources and land to achieve the objectives that are already outlined in the parliamentary and governing agreement, and indeed to meet commitments that were taken to the federal election by the federal government. That is what is different. The vote in May delivered an alignment of policy objectives between the commonwealth and the territory which was not there before. That is the result, a really important result, of the way people voted in May.
We outlined a series of commitments in the budget that passed at lunchtime. In the absence of Minister Gentleman, I feel it is appropriate to point out that you voted against the housing commitments within that budget, Mr Parton. I draw that to your attention because I know Minister Gentleman would do so if he were here. We have made commitments. We have funded them in the budget and we voted for the budget that has just passed.
We look forward now, ahead of the budget next Tuesday and a further budget that the commonwealth will deliver in May 2023, to working with them to deliver the ACT share of that national program that they have committed to, building on what we have already committed to. Hopefully, the productive discussions that have occurred to date can come to fruition—that we will be in a position to do more than what the federal government has already committed to and what we have already committed to, and that we will be able to work together, along with institutional investors such as superannuation funds, to bring even more capital to this task of building more social and affordable housing.
That is what we are working towards. What is different now is that we have a partner, in the federal government, that we did not have before. We have interest from institutional investors that we did not have before, and we are seeing that in the large-scale, build-to-rent programs. We have the first site on the market now, a government-released site, and we are looking to work with the private sector to see more large-scale, build-to-rent projects come into our market, all with a view to increasing the supply of rental housing, which we know, at certain times of the year,
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