Key Points
- The first home guarantee and its regional and family home equivalents will have their criteria expanded from 1 July.
- The definition of a "couple" will be altered to mean "any two eligible individuals".
- Australian permanent residents will also be eligible for the schemes.
More Australians will become eligible for three government housing schemes, in a bid to get people into their own homes as the nation tackles a crisis.
The first home guarantee and its regional and family home equivalents will have their criteria expanded from 1 July, to help more Australians achieve home ownership.
Under the schemes, the federal government acts as guarantor which allows people to buy a house with a deposit as low as 5 per cent, and avoid paying costly lender's mortgage insurance.
Who will be eligible?
The changes include altering the definition of a "couple" from meaning married or de facto relationships to "any two eligible individuals".
This opens up the criteria to include siblings, a parent or guardian and child, or two friends.
Housing Minister Julie Collins said the schemes needed to "move with the times".
"We're having friends, siblings, all types of people going into home ownership right across Australia today," she told Nine's Weekend Today program on Sunday.
"We also, importantly for single parents, are going to allow them to be eligible for the scheme.
"We've had some cases of children who are in foster care, who are nephews and nieces, for instance, being looked after by uncles and aunties who didn't meet the exact criteria of this scheme, so we're taking the opportunity to widen the scheme to allow them eligibility, as well."
People who have previously owned a home will also be eligible, on the provision they haven't owned one in the last 10 years, in a bid to help those who had fallen into financial hardship.
Australian permanent residents will be eligible for the schemes as well, rather than just citizens.
In total, 35,000 first homebuyer spots are available each year, with 10,000 for the regional first homebuyer guarantee, and 5,000 for the family home guarantee.
Will it help solve the housing crisis?
Deputy Opposition leader David Littleproud said the government's expansion of the schemes would help to address the housing crisis "in some small way", but it wouldn't be a "silver bullet".
"It's part of the total package of solutions that are required, but the biggest challenge we've got is supply," he told Nine's Weekend Today program on Sunday.
"There is going to be more pressure now that the government wants to bring in 650,000 over the next two years, so it is important that we accelerate the supply issue."
Ms Collins said the supply issue was being addressed through a "broad suite" of government policies.
"We, of course, have our Housing Australia Future Fund - the $10 billion fund that is the centrepiece that we took to the last election that is currently before the Senate, with the returns of that fund each year being invested in social and affordable rental homes in the country," she said.
"We are also doing that through our National Housing Accord, which, of course, is another 10,000 affordable rentals from the Commonwealth, and, of course, the states have agreed to match that from 1 July 2024.
"We're talking there an aspiration of a million homes over five years across the country, homes of all types."
The government has so far been unable to secure the support it needs to pass its Housing Australia Future Fund, .
Anglicare Australia's latest rental affordability snapshot, released this week,
The report found less than 1 per cent of rentals were affordable for a person on the age or disability support pensions. On the date the study was conducted, there were just 66 affordable properties for someone on a disability pension.
For someone on Youth Allowance, there was nothing on the market — not even a room in a share house.
Couples out of work, single parents relying on Centrelink, and Australians on the disability support pension were all dealing with a rental market where 0.2 per cent of rentals were affordable.
For the first time, the percentage of affordable rentals for a person on the minimum wage dropped to below 1 per cent.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was heckled on Saturday while pledging an additional $240 million to the Tasmanian government to build a new stadium in Hobart.
The stadium funding would go towards redeveloping Hobart's waterfront, including refreshing crown land from Macquarie Point to Regatta Point, core funding for the stadium, as well as transport infrastructure, port upgrades and housing, the government said.
Protesters argued such a funding commitment was not justified when Tasmania had Australia's fastest growth of homelessness.
The addition of a Tasmanian team to the AFL was conditional on the construction of the $715 million stadium.
- With AAP
