Q: During the pandemic, you spoke a lot about heeding the advice of experts. You spoke a lot about people shouldn’t dismiss the advice of experts and so forth. On housing, why are people like – you’ve been relatively dismissive of people like Chris Richardson and Saul Eslake for their assessments of the housing program yesterday. How is it that they’re wrong and you’re right?

Albanese:

I’m not sure that I’ve they’ve looked at all of the detail, frankly. Because some of the things that they’ve spoken about don’t match what we’re actually doing. What we’re doing – we have $10 billion, for example, and of that, $2 billion is in grants to be matched by state and territory governments. $8 billion is for loan and equity. Some of that money will then come back to the Commonwealth.

On Parramatta Road and Pyrmont Bridge Road, what you’re going to see this afternoon, to give you a preview on where you’re headed – you’re going to Melbourne, and you’re going to see houses that have been built as a direct result of the social housing accelerator where I brought forward $2 billion in immediate payments to states and territories not because of the Greens or the coalition in the Senate – in spite of them.

Because they were blocking the Housing Australia Future Fund like they blocked the Help to Buy Scheme until December of last year. And then they go, having said – I mean, the hypocrisy of the Coalition…they say, “Oh, you haven’t built enough homes fast enough.” Well, there’s 28,000 under the Housing Australia Future Fund, under social housing, that are either under construction or in planning – awaiting approvals. That would have been a lot more, and things would have been completed a lot more, if they hadn’t have held it up for month after month after month. Actual passing motions in the Senate to say, “The Senate cannot consider this until” – some future date. And THEN, the Senate sitting again and doing the same thing again. So the coalition, or the no-alition, as I call it – Peter Dutton speaks a lot about the Greens. He’s happy to vote with them all the time to block supply. That is what they have done.