And then to Michael Sukkar:

Q: You have criticised the Labor target. You don’t appear to have one. Will you set a target? And will you keep in place the housing planning reform the states signed up to, whether that be to reform it in some way, keep it, or will you scrap it?

Sukkar:

The problem for Clare and the government is that, when you continually say to Australians – who I think have every right to take you at face value – that you’re going to deliver 1.2 million homes when you’re falling hundreds of thousands of homes short, you’re insulting their intelligence. When you tell Australians as Clare just did then in her remarks that the Labor government’s building more homes – well, that is against every single ABS statistic that every single person in this room could find very easily on their phone.

We’re building fewer homes after three years of a Labor government than the former Coalition government which Clare criticises.

If the former coalition government was so terrible, I wonder how Clare will judge this government. Because they’re building 30,000 homes a year less. So we’re building fewer homes and yet we have a government putting out a target that they now know they won’t meet. They now know they won’t meet. We will build more homes than the Labor Party. In the preceding five years before this government came to power, Australia built more than a million homes.

Routinely, in Australia, over 5-year periods, in about the last 25 years, we’ve built more than a million homes. We’re not on track to build a million homes after five years of the Labor government, so we’ve actually gone backwards.

We’re not even maintaining the status quo of what Australia was building previously. So we’re going backwards and, at the same time that we’re going backwards, we have a government that’s had this genius idea to run a world-record migration program, which has driven rents up by nearly 20%. Renters are the biggest casualty of the Big Australia policy from the Labor Party, with 20% increases.

So I can assure you, Tom, and I can assure Australians – just like we built more homes in the previous coalition government, we will build more homes than Labor…

(But there is no target)