Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Y (—) (): I rise to speak on these three bills—the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council Bill 2023 and Treasury Laws Amendment (Housing Measures No. 1) Bill 2023. The opposition have announced that we will be supporting the latter two, so I will be confining my comments to the first of these three bills, the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill, because I think it raises quite a number of issues that I'm not sure that we know the answers to.

Homeownership in Australia, I think, is the foundation—the bricks and the mortar—on which our society was built. The aspiration of owning a home in Australia has been one of the foundation stones—the ability for people to raise families on a suburban block where their kids can kick the football around. I accept block sizes are getting much smaller nowadays, but a man's house is his castle—all those cliches you can use in a debate like this, which I think really go to the Australian success story and one of the reasons our Australian society is so successful. Millions of Australians have raised their children, their families, on that block of land and in that house, and hundreds of thousands of Australians have used the equity in that house as the stepping stone into business, to found a new enterprise.

One of the great regrets I have about the remote Indigenous communities that I have in my electorate is that, because it's community land, they can't own their own houses, and they are condemned, in a way, to rental accommodation at the moment. They can't own their own house, which means they are unable to talk to a bank and say: 'What's my house worth? Can I build a hairdressing shop down the street or whatever?' I know that is getting off the debate, but it is linked to this idea that homeownership is a secure source of wealth on which to build your life.

I think this bill gives up a bit on that dream of homeownership and says, 'Well, actually what we need is rental accommodation.' It doesn't specifically say that, but it seems to me to be leading down that line of saying, 'Give up on the aspirations.' It's really hard for a worker, a family or someone on welfare to be in rental accommodation, pay the rent every week and raise the deposit for a home so they can actually turn those rental payments into payments to pay down their loan and eventually own their house. I would prefer that there be more emphasis on getting people into their own homes than on getting them into other people's homes.

Of course, in the last three years of government, we helped 300,000 people to get into their houses, so their payments each week or each month go to actually paying off their houses. One of these programs, of course, was the homeowners scheme, but it isn't the only one that helps people down that pathway. I think that's quite a remarkable achievement.

It's worth recalling that at the beginning of the COVID virus there were many predictions by economists around Australia that the Australian housing market was going to collapse because we were going to stop the immigration program, we would have empty houses everywhere and builders would be out of work—all those things. Sure, the government stepped in and made a difference there with the new homeowners scheme. but there was something that all the economists missed—or all the ones I was reading, at least. Five hundred thousand Australians decided to come home, because Australia looked a pretty safe place to be. They were right. Largely these were expats. They came back, and they were cashed up, and they soaked up a lot of the housing stock. I fully accept that we have real difficulties in Australian society today. I expect, though, that there will be a new wave of Aussies who will go overseas to live for a period of time and actually come out of the housing market over the next five years. I think that should be part of the consideration of all of these things.

One of the things I'm always concerned about is mission creep. This is something that happens at the Commonwealth level so often, and this is the perfect instance. Social housing and welfare housing—low-income housing—have clearly been the responsibility of state governments, just as state schools and state hospitals have been the responsibility of state governments. But increasingly, on both sides of politics, when the Commonwealth has seen the states failing in their duty, we've stepped in, and guess what—what's the next thing? We own the problem. Increasingly that's what we're doing with housing as well. We step in because states have largely gotten out of social housing. In my own state of South Australia we had a premier for 26½ years, Sir Thomas Playford. He invested heavily in the South Australian Housing Trust. He built places like Elizabeth, like Whyalla. There was a whole lot of Housing Trust homes going on. Over the years successive governments of both political persuasions—even though in South Australia, sadly, I must report, it is nearly always the Labor Party; they seem to be the party of government in South Australia—have sold off the housing stock. They have exited the scene and turned around and said to the Commonwealth, 'You have to help us out.'

I accept there is a problem and that we have been there before the current government but this is really upping the ante. This bill is now saying that the Commonwealth will go out and borrow $10 billion and start trickling that back into supporting social housing. Firstly, on the issue of that $10 billion, it is worth remarking that, in the period I have been in this parliament, which is over 15 years now, we used to be talking about millions but now we are talking about billions. It is almost as if the numbers in front of them haven't changed. There are a thousand implications in talking about millions and billions. It is a thousand times as much. Ten billion dollars is $10,000 million. That is a lot of loot. It has a ring to it. I see the member for Durack nodding. It has a ring to it of the hollow men: '$3 billion won't do it; perhaps $5 billion; I know, let's go for $10 billion; we'll go right over the top'. I think there is a bit of over exuberance going on here.

Another concern is that governments of both political persuasions have indulged in this pathway of going off budget by saying that we are buying an asset, so we are borrowing money but we own an asset now and that doesn't need to be in the budget. The most spectacular example of that would be the NBN, but it is probably a fair assumption that the Commonwealth owns a fair kind of asset there. Generally speaking, these off-budget expenditures to acquire assets which are income earning are physical assets that you can sort of touch and feel. You can see what it is worth and, if you don't like it, you can sell it off. I don't think that is the case with this Future Housing Fund. We are borrowing money at the government bond rate, which currently is 3.8 per cent, close to four per cent—that is, $400 million a year. That will probably be locked in for 10 years despite whichever way borrowing rates go and depending on when the money is borrowed, of course, and that is a liquid scene.

The concept of giving it to the Australia Future Fund to invest is good. My colleagues have made the point that the Future Fund is up and down and lost 3.7 per cent last year. But it has had a pretty good track record and, from my point of view, that is not unreasonable place to park that money. Why would you borrow money to park money? That is a little odd; I'm not sure about that. Basically the government is asking us to take a bet that the Future Fund performance will exceed the borrowing rate.

Another concern I have in this issue is the erosion of the real-dollar value. Currently the inflation rate is 7.8 per cent. If you are going to lose $400,000—we don't know what the Future Fund is going to do—and then devalue the pool by 7.8 per cent, by the time we get to the end of the year, virtually nothing will have been spent and we will already be down below $9 billion. I point out that $9 billion is $1,000 million less than $10 billion. These are big sums. It is a policy that is leading us in a couple of wrong directions. It is leading us away from home ownership. It is letting the states off the hook. The states will, presumably, line up for this money, and they will put it where they see best—for either the good of the people or their political advantage. Consequently, the Commonwealth has just given them a pool of money to use for their purposes. That's why I believe there are enough concerns in this area for me to not support the bill—that we go along this pathway of propping up state governments, that we give up on the idea of Australian homeownership. I think that's the most central point.

Government policy should be about owning the keys, getting your own keys to your own door, your own life or your family and the ability to build a net wealth for the foundations of your family. It's one of the reasons the Liberal Party is in favour of people being able to borrow against their superannuation. In your superannuation you can invest in anyone else's house but your own. That seems preposterous to me. The proposal that we put forward before the last election would require someone, if they had drawn down on their superannuation fund, to actually pay that fund back if they sold the house. I think that was very, very good policy. I am very wary of people tapping into their superannuation fund for other reasons—to fund a European trip, the retiling of the bathroom or whatever it might be—but investing in the bricks and mortar of a house, history will tell you, is one of the best investments you will ever make. I think the proposal of drawing down on superannuation has great merit. I think we would be far wiser in this parliament if we were pursuing that now rather than this proposal. I will be opposing the bills.

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