Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just before the member for Bonner departs the House, I must  say I was interested in some of her remarks. She can be congratulated for her enthusiasm, but a bit of practical knowledge might have helped somewhat. She talked about first home saver accounts, but that amount of money is not going to do much if you have got to pay $300,000 to $400,000 for a block of land. And why are blocks of land so expensive in Australia? You would think we had run out of territory. We have got the territory, but we have ridiculous impositions of state government and local government charges and delays. The fact is that, unless governments address the fundamental issues—for instance, the gross escalation of land prices relevant to house prices—then it does not matter if you give people a few thousand dollars to add to their savings account and some tax deductibility.

Nobody wants to talk about the process of leasing land for a weekly or monthly charge over 90 years to homeowners, which would then halve the borrowings they might need to obtain a house. Nobody has looked at the opportunity of allowing the rural sector to lease land on their properties for rural homes that could be built thereafter for less than $50,000. We have laws in Australia that prevent people allocating rural land for release to people wishing to live there—and, of course, if the residents’ debts were minimal then they could work comfortably at wages relative to the rural sector’s capacity to pay.

I could go on; I just note those particular things. I note that the rights of women were mentioned—but not if you are working fly-in, fly-out and have a gross family income of over $150,000 and you are trying to buy a house in Sydney or Melbourne, or Brisbane for that matter. If you do not have $150,000 you cannot afford a house. Are those people rich? Are they to be denied the bit of assistance that the baby bonus provides? I have a daughter who has just had to buy a second child car seat because she now has another baby, and what are they—500 bucks each? It is big money, and a lot of young people do not have it.

This is how silly it is, because I did the figures. You could have two neighbours living in Sydney in a median house price area. The first purchased their house in 2001 and the other, in 2003. By an accident of history, they have a differential in interest charges—nothing to do with interest rates, just the interest on the additional median cost of that house—of $18,000. If the first buyer is on an income of $149,000, they are entitled to the baby bonus, but, if the other people are on $151,000, they are not, yet the latter are by comparison about $16,000 a year worse off than their neighbours who bought two years earlier. Is that a help? Is that helping working families? Not by my measure. It is a case of people needing to learn what ‘rich’ means in this day and age. If you wish to house your family as your parents housed you, $150,000 is a ridiculous amount to consider evidence of wealth.

After the budget was announced, I walked up to a doorstop interview the next morning and made a fundamental comment: ‘The budget delivered Peter Costello’s tax cuts and Wayne Swan’s tax increases.’ And to what do the government’s tax increases apply? Consumption. Now, you can argue that that is a good idea if you want to stop people buying and put people out of work in retail and car sales and all those sorts of things—if you think that is the way to manage the economy.

I want to put an alternative view in this debate. The reality is, of course, that it is inflationary by any measure. Our leader came forward and said, ‘We’ll take 5c off petrol tax.’ That is a reduction in prices. It is clearly measurable. Don’t ever tell me you need to mess up the GST system any more. When Paul Keating was confronted with the GST, at least he had the honesty to tell the Australian people, ‘Vote Liberal and you’ll get the GST, because I won’t oppose it.’ Please remember, he tried to bring one in in earlier years and it was knocked on the head by the trade union movement with a sleazy meeting in a motel room here in Canberra.

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