Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It drives all investors out of the market, other than those who are prepared to take the risk that a loss on the property cannot be offset against their other income, which would hardly be rational. That is calculated, it is designed, to reduce the value of every single home in Australia.

I ask honourable members to contemplate this. Let us contemplate a family whose mortgage is 70 per cent of the value of their home today. They look at the market. They see it is subdued. Yes, it has had a big run-up in Sydney, for example, but now it is jogging along a little bit below the rate of inflation. Labor comes along with this policy. Let us say house prices come down by 10 per cent. The honourable member for McMahon should well remember this, because in south-west Sydney prices came down, around the time of the GFC, by quite a bit more than that. But, if they come down by 10 per cent, that family have lost one-third of their net worth. And the honourable members opposite ask us to believe that that is not going to have any impact on their investment, on what they will spend.

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