Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Reducing Pressure on Housing Affordability Measures No. 1) Bill 2017. I'm pleased to rise, following the member for Canberra, to speak on such an important issue, an issue that is alive in the electorate of Lalor—alive in the communities that I represent. Just this weekend I was in a conversation with a local person who wanted to talk to me about her family, her adult children, who she believes are locked out of ever affording their own house. She thinks the days of Australians owning their own home in communities like mine are over. Where does she get that impression? She gets that impression because the cost of buying a home in this country have spiralled out of control. With this bill, this government is putting an absolutely sham suggestion before us—the suggestion that allowing young people to access part of their superannuation for a short time, which would only create the possibility of a deposit to let them enter the market and only if they were already in recipient of superannuation payments, will somehow affect housing affordability. Well, it won't affect the cost of housing. It will have limited impact on young people in my electorate being able to break in to buying their own home.

This is the great Australian dream. It is a sad day when we have a Treasurer, the member for Cook, a Treasurer who comes up with the sham notion simply to get past the headlines, simply to kick this can down the road, at a time when we know that inequality is above 70-year levels. When wage growth is slowed and company profits are up, it is a sham to bring before this House a proposal that is next to useless.

We know that Labor created compulsory superannuation with a specific purpose: so that early contributions to superannuation will grow your investment over the long term to make for a dignified, comfortable retirement. That is the purpose of superannuation. This piece of legislation seeks to undermine that by encouraging young people to access that superannuation. There are a few problems I have with this from the get-go. The first of them is that it's not 12 months since I stood in this chamber to condemn the government because they were seeking to reduce the penalty for businesses who did not make superannuation contributions for their employees. We've gone from that to a government who says, 'We have a solution to housing affordability—it's allowing access to superannuation.' I have another local story. Quite recently I was in a conversation with a local young person working in retail in my electorate who was telling me about her two-year pursuit of a company she had worked for—a two-year pursuit, and she was still not in receipt of the superannuation that she was owed for a period of three years. What hope is there for her to access superannuation to get together a housing deposit when the superannuation hasn't been paid in the first place? It was taking longer than two years; it had been two years at the point I was speaking to her that she had been trying to chase down these funds and have them put into her superannuation.

We know that in this country we have a serious situation in term of housing affordability. No-one knows that better than me, because I represent the communities in Victoria that have the highest rates of mortgage default and tenancy evictions. People in rental properties in my electorate are doing it tough to keep up with paying their rent. The Victorian state Labor government has made changes to the tenancy act. They had a review and announced changes that they want to bring into the tenancy act. But really the only way to impact on both the number of evictions that are happening in tenancy and the mortgage stress that's happening in our community is to address housing affordability. Yet this government comes in here with a piece of legislation that will have no impact on housing prices in this country.

This proposal is a disgrace. It first encourages Australians to use superannuation for things that it was not intended for and second seeks to kick this can down the road and hope that headlines around housing affordability won't come back, while in a community like mine the number of renters massively increases and fewer and fewer young people can afford to break into the market. If the government were serious they would be addressing this issue. As the member for Canberra put so clearly, not having a minister for housing and homelessness speaks volumes about the care factor on the other side of this chamber about this issue and about the people in my electorate and electorates like mine. No action—this government's inaction—will see the housing affordability crisis worsen.

In contrast, Labor have clear policies, which we would dearly love those opposite to take with both hands and implement, that would have a real impact on the housing affordability crisis. Those opposite want to make an announcement with this piece of legislation that won't work, but it will take years to assess its effectiveness. Meanwhile, the housing affordability crisis will worsen. Fewer and fewer young people in electorates like mine will be able to afford to get into the property market at all. Labor have no problem with the plan, under the downsizing elements in this bill, to allow people over the age of 65 to make contributions of up to $300,000 to their super fund. If it were separated from the rest of this bill, Labor would support that measure. But we have real issues with the fact that this bill will not tackle housing affordability.

We need to be really clear in this place today that the government have many options. One of the ways in which they might support people in an electorate like mine would be to desist from their attacks on the take-home pay of the people who work in my electorate, which are best exemplified, of course, by the cuts to penalty rates that are occurring. In the electorate of Lalor 8,860 retail workers and 4,600 workers in food and accommodation, in total over 13,000 workers, have had their ability to afford a house directly affected by the inaction of those opposite towards stopping the cuts to penalty rates. If those opposite wanted to help housing affordability they could start there. We're in the fifth year of this government, so over the past four-year journey they could have not walked into this place and dared Holden to leave. They could have assured the 4,000 workers in my electorate whose jobs are linked to the auto industry, and the many more in Melbourne's west, that they would ensure the Toyota manufacturing plant in my electorate didn't close, with the consequential threat of the closure of many of the components-making factories in that industry. They could have done that. They chose not to. In fact, this week we've heard them try to whitewash history by suggesting they took no part, made no decision, that impacted on those things. We all know that's not true. We all remember being in this chamber when the Treasurer made that call to Holden and dared them to leave this country, which set about the closing down of not just Holden but Toyota as well. And their response to that closure has been far from satisfactory. Those workers who are in my electorate are not getting the level of support they had come to expect from federal governments when an industry closed. They are now scrambling to find jobs that will pay them a decent salary. Most of them will ultimately be looking to work in the transport and logistics field in my electorate because they see that as a growth industry. Unfortunately, that industry is dominated by labour hire practices which will not see them in secure work and will not see them receiving the rates of pay they were accustomed to in the auto industry.

If this government were serious about addressing housing affordability and, therefore, serious about addressing homelessness in this country, they would be taking a very different tack. Addressing housing affordability will help to alleviate some of the pressures that force people into homelessness. The shadow minister responsible, Senator Cameron, has visited my electorate. He has sat with people who are going through homelessness, who have fallen off that cliff into homelessness. He understands clearly housing affordability—what it means in terms of rent and what it means in terms of homelessness and the growing number of homeless in my electorate.

Next month, West Justice, the community legal centre in my electorate, will be releasing their report on couch surfing. I find it absolutely incredible that I am on my feet in Canberra talking about changes to superannuation to supposedly have a positive impact in this space while knowing the numbers of young people who are already unable to find employment and who are already technically homeless or casually homeless—in that they are moving from place to place with no fixed address, reaching out to community members for support, with no clear support from this government. These things are now going to compound, one after the other, as this government's inaction causes all these issues to be worse.

Achieving the Australian dream and owning a home is continually slipping from the reach of young first home buyers. As a mother of three adult children, I know this firsthand, and I speak to families in my electorate who do as well. The capacity to save for a house deposit while you are in the casual workforce is absolutely untenable. It is untenable that we would think that young people can be in those circumstances and save for a house. As they move from job to job, from workplace to workplace, and then spend time checking to see if their superannuation is actually being paid, we're a far cry from the stability of some of the communities those opposite may live in, where people have well-paid jobs, where people are not in casual employment and where people are having their superannuation paid in the first place.

We know that a former Reserve Bank governor, Bernie Fraser, has spoken against the current housing tax arrangements, calling them 'manifestly unfair'. Labor has put policies before this government that could assist in decreasing the cost of housing in this country and could allow young people to not be bidding against investors at every auction across my electorate. These are policies that this government should adopt. Two-thirds of those who negatively gear are on a taxable income of $80,000 or less. While they represent a large proportion of those who negatively gear, they only represent eight per cent of the population and only make up to 58 per cent of the negative gearing benefit. The top 20 per cent of income earners receive around half of the negative gearing benefit, and the top 10 per cent of income earners merely receive 70 per cent of the benefit. We can see that negative gearing disproportionately benefits a small wealthy minority. Changes, therefore, would manifestly assist the large majority. Limiting the use of negative gearing to newly built homes would result in a boost to housing supply while slowing the explosion in housing prices in established areas. As someone who represents a growth corridor, I can say that this policy would work for our community. We would see people continue to be employed in the housing building industry, while pressure on the middle wing of suburbs would be reduced. These changes would provide an extra $32 billion to the budget bottom line over 10 years.

This government continues to ignore the needs of the majority of Australians in order to support big business. This piece of legislation is about kicking the can down the road on housing affordability. It is about hoping that the headlines go away. Those opposite are living in a dream. The number of young people who can afford a house is dwindling every day, and the number of those in my electorate who are worried about this, concerned about this and prepared to talk about this is growing every day. I urge this government to adopt Labor's policies, to do something real about housing affordability in this country.

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