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

I thank the honourable member for his interesting wander through the press gallery. We started off with Lenore Taylor; now we have moved on to Paul Kelly. We only have 15 minutes left in question time, he is going to have to hurry up because he will leave a lot of disappointed reporters and commentators if he does not get to them.

A government member: What about James Jeffrey?

Yes, what about James Jeffrey? What about Denis Shanahan? David Crowe? Samantha Maiden? Laura Tingle? Malcolm Farr—what about him?

A government member: Laurie Oakes.

Yes. He has left Laurie Oakes off the list. That is a very big call.

This is the fundamental issue: the Labor Party talk about evidence based policy—fair enough. Where is their evidence that reducing the demand for existing housing by at least a third is not going to affect prices? It beggars belief. There may be some strange new factor of which we are not aware, some sort of magical economics that only the shadow Treasurer is alert to. There may be something that the member for Fraser has come up with, as he has made his journey from rational economist to political apparatchik. There may be something that we do not know about but they really should produce it, because Australians are pretty shrewd about property prices. They pay a lot of attention to them. They should because it is their biggest asset. They know that if you take a third of the buyers out of the ring, prices will come down. Everybody understands that. That is what markets do. Everybody understands that except for the Labor Party.

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