Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

As the shadow Treasurer says, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The assistant minister was right a second time as well: he said, 'Labor know exactly what they are doing with their new tax policy.' Well, we do.

Of course, the agreement did not last very long when I found the Assistant Minister to the Treasurer starting to talk about what a great job the Baird government was doing with social housing. It is the housing in Millers Point in my electorate that he is talking about. It is being sold, throwing communities out of their homes. They have been there, in some cases, for generations. In comparison, I remember a government that built 21,600 new social housing dwellings. That was a Labor government under Kevin Rudd. So that is the comparison: you can throw old people out of their homes in Millers Point, the Baird government's approach, or you can build 21,600 new social housing dwellings. The shadow Treasurer said earlier that Joe Hockey's answer to housing affordability in Australia was a long time coming, and we did not really get an answer, other than people should go out and 'get a good job'.

It made me really think about my own family and the circumstances of their buying a home. My parents came to Australia in the 1950s with nothing, like most migrants. They worked extraordinarily hard to put a deposit on a block of land, pay it off and build a house themselves—they were living in the house before there were floorboards. Each week, my dad would spend a bit more money, buy some more building equipment and do a bit more work on the house. They bought that block of land—this is from memory, so I would have to double-check this with my mum on the weekend when I see her—for 250 pounds in the late 1950s. In those days, an ordinary man with an ordinary job, married to a woman who stayed at home to raise her family, worked hard but could afford an ordinary home. Compare that to the circumstances of my niece and her husband today—a teacher and a geologist, both professional people and both very good savers. They have been saving for years—in fact, they had one of our first home saver accounts before that lot opposite abolished the first home saver accounts. They are saving as hard as they can and wondering whether they can possibly afford a home of their own, particularly before they start a family. It is not the case with my niece and her husband, but people moving into their 30s are still living at home. Many people will tell you about parents of my age and older with adult children living at home because those adult children feel that they will never be able to afford to both pay rent and save a deposit for a home. They feel they will never be able to afford a home of their own.

We are changing our entire society because of this issue of housing unaffordability. We know that only one in seven homes bought now is bought by a first home buyer. We know that in 1985 you needed a bit more than three times the average income to buy a house, but today you need about 6½ times the average income to buy a house. We know that in 1985 the average housing debt was 27 per cent of average income. Today it is 136 per cent. We see that an ordinary couple or an ordinary person with an ordinary job can no longer afford an ordinary home. And what have those opposite done in response to this? They got rid of first home saver accounts, they got rid of the Housing Supply Council and they got rid of the COAG council that was set up specifically to deal with what the Assistant Minister to the Treasurer talks about: the responsibility of state governments and local governments to release housing supply. They got rid of that. They got rid of the Housing Supply Council. Of course, they also abolished the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which 'only' built 26,000 homes before they killed it off. That is not much of a contribution! What have the Romans done for me lately, apart from those 26,000 homes they built! They got rid of the help-for-seniors housing program. More recently, they have been bagging us for our tax policies. What is their tax policy? It is a 15 per cent GST on everything. Would that have applied to rents as well? (Time expired)

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