Arabic version: أونيل تصف خطاب براغ عن الإسكان بأنه «منفلت»

According to The Guardian, federal housing minister Clare O’Neil has sharply criticised shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg’s National Press Club address, describing it as “unhinged”. Her comments followed a wide-ranging speech in which Bragg stood by a proposal to lower net migration to 180,000 a year and argued for major changes to housing policy.

O’Neil said Bragg’s speech was a “crazed, almost manic ideological fever dream” that included references to communism, the Morrison government’s “madness” and superannuation as state-sponsored corruption. She said the address was “genuinely unhinged”.

A central element of Bragg’s proposal was to reduce the National Construction Code from more than 2,000 pages to 80 pages. O’Neil said she agreed the housing construction code was “too complex”, but said any rewrite would need a “diligent reform process” involving the sector.

She said an 80-page code would mean scrapping housing standards, arguing that this was not a serious answer to housing problems. O’Neil said consumers would ultimately bear the cost if homes lacked heating and cooling, through higher energy prices.