Q: The maths on the Labor side says that you’ll put forward $10 billion. It will build 100,000 homes. That’s basically $100,000 per home. On the Coalition side, the claim is that you’ll put $5 billion into infrastructure. That maginically unlocks 500,000 homes, which is $10,000 per home. I’ll leave it to voters to decide whether $100,000 per home or $10,000 per home is more convincing. But the key question is – for the sceptical journalists here. Will you put forward and tell us who told you the number of homes that you will build. And will you release the information, the treasury or PBO or somebody else so we can verify that you’ll build the homes that you claim?

Michael Sukkar:

It is a good question and good to be cynical about this. What we’re proposing with the housing infrastructure program, not that we’re building homes. And the important word you used quite rightly is “unlock”. We’re going to unlock those homes because at the moment, we have projects where the projects stack up. But there’s no funding for that. If you talk to the NBA, the Property Council, who are the real experts here, a rough figure of civil works of about $10,000 to unlock that is pretty well, I can assure you, without housing of the structural program which we think is going to unlock 500,000 homes, it is not modelling.

We have literally met with hundreds of councils. We have the projects, line by line, the number of houses that will be unlocked from that funding. Really well thought through projects. It is a very big spreadsheet, and can I say the 500,000 number we deliberately chose a conservative figure. It is actually higher than that but to deal with the cynicism and to building a little bit of leeway, we have been very conservative when we said 500,000.

Clare O’Neil:

The Coalition’s estimates are totally fanciful, absolutely ridiculous. If it was that easy to fix the problem we wouldn’t be in a crisis. We know that because this is something the Coalition tried last time they were in office and I would love for you to go back and have a look at what was achieved through that. They set up a fund of $1 billion that was supposed to fund investor exactly they described. It 5000 homes. There is no way these numbers will stack up. Our numbers come from Treasury. It is a policy we have been working on for a long time with Treasury officials. $10 million, you have talked about the 100,000. I want to explain this as clearly as I can. We are not paying for the entire cost of building a new home. What we are doing is assisting state development agencies and in some in answers private developers making projects that do not stack up today stack up and the reason that the government will intervene is because in exchange they will give us those homes for first home buyers at entry-level prices. I say to you again, this is something that is really working in South Australia. We want to build on it and make it national.