Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021. I specifically want to talk about the Family Home Guarantee, which is part of schedule 2 of this bill. The Labor Party support this, but we support it like you would support a bucket of water in a drought: we'll take it, but it's not enough to fix the problem. It's not enough to make a really big difference. It's not enough to fix the housing affordability problem that we all know exists in this country.

There are one million single-parent families right across Australia, and a lot of them could do with this sort of help to buy a home. According to this legislation, this help will be provided to 10,000 single-parent families over four years—in other words, roughly 2,500 a year over four years. That's what the government's press release says. That's what Budget Paper No. 2 says. It's also what the explanatory memorandum to this bill says. It says, 'Up to 10,000 guarantees expected to be issued.' My question to the government, to the minister who's introduced the legislation, is: Is that it? Is 10,000 a hard cap? What if more than 10,000 people want to access this scheme? Will they be able to or not? It's not clear from this legislation whether they would be turned away.

The First Home Loan Deposit Scheme Guarantee has a hard cap. This is modelled on that scheme. Will this be a hard cap as well? If it is and if there are more single-parent families who want to access this scheme to buy a home, then they'll miss out, or at least their chances of buying a home will be delayed for another year or another year after that—and there are a million of them. Single-parent families do need a leg-up, a bit of extra help, to buy a home. I think we all get that. It's universally supported by members of this House. If there are a million of them in Australia, if this scheme is only going to help 2,500 a year over the next four years, a lot are going to miss out.

There's another group of Aussies who need help and who don't get help out of this scheme as well. Think about single-parent families where there are no dependent kids. I'm talking about single-parent families where the kids have left home. They might have gone to university, Mum and Dad might have got divorced or the family may have broken up for whatever reason. The fastest-growing group of homeless Aussies at the moment are older women, aged 65-74—people my mum's age or my aunty's age. I think we all know people in that sort of situation. When they get divorced and they split the assets, often it is the case that a lot of women don't have enough money to buy a house again and end up renting for the rest of their life and living on the pension. If you're renting and living off the pension, that's a recipe for poverty. This scheme doesn't do anything to help them.

If this scheme is going to help single parents, then it's also really important that they get the price cap right that this scheme will operate under. The legislation allows people to get access to this guarantee as long as they buy a home under a certain price. To get access to the scheme, you have to buy a house that's less than a certain level—and that's fair enough. You want to make sure that you're helping people on modest incomes. You want to make sure that you're helping people who are buying the sort of home that they can afford. But you also want to make sure that there are homes for them to buy. That's the critical thing. And the problem is, at least from what we've seen in Launceston recently, that there aren't.

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