Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to follow the previous speaker on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Reducing Pressure on Housing Affordability Measures No. 2) Bill 2018. I think where he finished is where I would start. This is a crisis in this nation that affects people, and in this place we can often get lost in the numbers. The numbers are profound. We are now right at the top—it's not a competition we want to win, but we're right at the top—in the world now as one of the most expensive places to buy a house or rent a house. That's not where we want to be. That's not what good policy should be seeking to achieve.

We've seen change in just a generation. It used to take about four or five times an average weekly wage to get an average kind of home—that's been fairly steady, with a few ups and downs, for many decades. That's grown out of control in the last couple of decades. In Melbourne and Sydney, for example, you need between 10 and 12 times an average weekly wage just to have a crack at getting an average foothold in the housing market. It's not a situation which we should be relaxed and comfortable about, to borrow John Howard's ridiculous phrase. His aspiration for the nation was to be relaxed and comfortable—what a silly aspiration for a nation! The current Prime Minister's aspiration for the nation seems to be an Australia where he's the Prime Minister forever and his rich mates pay a bit less tax. That's pretty much the extent of it.

The other aspects of the numbers are instructive. We have 195,000 people right now across Australia on social housing waiting lists. None of the bills that the government's putting forward do anything about that. We had 288,000 people in 2017 presented to homelessness services. That is 288,000 Australians seeking help in one year. They're people, not numbers.

In response to this crisis, we were told in the lead-up to the budget—remember the headlines?—we were going to have housing as a centrepiece of the budget. It was going to be fantastic. We were finally going to confront this crisis. That lasted for about two weeks and then kind of fizzed away. I think Paul Keating's comment on the Prime Minister is apt: he's a fizzer. Big red firecracker, light it up, off it goes and then nothing.

In response to that, we have no minister, no plan and a series of teeny tiny bills scattered around the Notice Paper. If you brought them forward together, maybe it would look a little bit more like a package then, but instead I think the political strategy is to have a whole bunch of do-not-much and do-nothing bills scattered around with 'housing' in the title, creating the illusion of activity, because, if you say 'housing' in the title of a bill, maybe someone will think you're taking the crisis seriously and doing something.

The other aspect of the strategy, as we hear from government speakers on these teeny tiny bills every now and again when they pop up, is to blame the states. It's all the states' fault, you see, because they haven't put enough money in here or it's a supply problem. We haven't got enough land supply; that's the problem one week. But that is a nonsense. As we know, housing is a market. There is a housing market. There's clearly a role for government, particularly at the crisis end, for people who are desperately poor and need a house to live in. Shelter over their heads is kind of important in the scheme of things.

But there's also supply and demand in a market. Yes, there should be a focus on supply. Most of that—not all of it but most—is largely within the province of the states making sure there are enough new development sites on the edges of cities and in established areas to build houses on. That's fine. But there's also demand and, whichever way you look at it, the big levers of demand are in the Commonwealth's control. They just point-blank refuse to own up to that or do anything about it. I say to the government: every time you bring forward one of your silly little do-nothing bills that don't really address the problem with housing in the title, we will stand up, we will speak up and we will call you out for the lack of action.

Some measures in the government's little do-nothing bills are actually harmful—for example, the 'raid your own superannuation' one. Apart from the fact that it distorts the purpose of superannuation in this country, which is to provide for a decent retirement, not to get you a house to live in when you're young, all economists—but they're just economists who study these things; the government are a bunch of geniuses, of course, who know best on most matters, particularly when they don't like looking at expert evidence—say that's kind of a dumb thing to do if housing's unaffordable, because you just put more fuel on the fire. You push up prices by adding to demand and bringing more cash in.

From our point of view, most of the government's budget measures do very little. That one, as we've spoken about, is downright harmful but comes on the top of the quite offensive set of statements that we've heard from the government like 'Get rich parents.' Particularly in the major capital cities, as I've said, if housing now is 10 to 11 times average weekly earnings just to have a crack, you probably do need rich parents to get your $100,000 or $200,000 for a deposit so you can have a crack at borrowing the rest. That's if you're not in the casualised workforce which the government is hell-bent on accelerating in its own workforce of the Public Service, as we're now learning, but also more broadly. You can't get a loan. Funnily enough, if you're a casual worker for 13 years, you can't actually get a bank loan to have a crack at buying a house even if you've got rich parents to give you the deposit. Or everyone could get a $200,000 job. You could get a much better paying job and then you could have a house. We heard in the last few weeks the third leg of the three-legged stool—remember we had trilemmas and three-legged stools last year for a little while on energy policy. The third leg of the housing policy is, 'Get rich mates.' If you haven't got rich mates or you can't get a great big pay rise, that is another option. You could get a rich mate to just give you a house.

I want to make a couple of remarks on negative gearing and capital gains tax. Again, we've said we'll stand up, we'll speak up, we'll call this out every time they bring forward a nothing bill. The fact is that the current combination of negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions fuel demand for housing. I don't think that's a controversial statement. But that's for a few reasons. Partly it's a terrible, ridiculous and unproductive use of capital. If you're a high-income earner in this country, the most rational thing to do on a Saturday is wander down the street, find an auction and bid up the cost of an existing house. You can outbid a first home buyer because you get a great big tax kick from the Australian government. The people who need it least, as usual with this government, get the most.

We hear a lot about investment at the moment. I would think that it's not a difficult thing to see that that is an unproductive use of capital. Bidding up the cost of an existing house is not actually where we want spare capital from high-income earners or those with cash in their pockets to be putting it. I'm old fashioned on this. Housing is for people to live in. Housing isn't supposed to be the preferred investment vehicle or a class of investment in the country. It's completely unproductive. I'd rather see a tax system that encourages people with a bit of spare money to invest in the share market or invest in businesses or invest in something that might grow the economy and grow jobs. Who knew? It's a very pro-business statement, I know.

But as we've also heard, the current tax concessions are enormously regressive. Overwhelmingly, the benefit goes to those who have most, the top 20 per cent of income earners, people already with capital and wealth. As usual with this government, they get the big kick along and the benefit. Every few weeks when this comes up in question time, we hear about the nurse and how somehow apparently we on this side hate nurses because we want to refocus the nurse investor. Again, it's a smokescreen and a distraction.

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