Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There was some interesting reading for members of this House and the Senate over summer. A lot of that was courtesy of the Treasurer, and I'd like to come back to this because it matters in this debate. We're here debating the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill. But all of these bills contribute to the larger, bigger picture and the focus of this government, and it's important to analyse and look at the focus of this government and the consequences of that.

Many have spoken about homeownership as a core value for the Liberal Party, and it is, I submit, a core value for this nation. There's a reason that one of the most popular and well loved movies in Australia is The Castlebecause our home is our castle, and it is a place to raise a family and it is a place to have security and to have a good life.

Indeed, for Robert Menzies, who my seat is named after, that was his No. 1 ambition for this nation—that every family has a home to call their own. It his seminal speech 'The forgotten people', Menzies emphatically laid out the manifold centrality of this. He said:

The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.

And he said a home is your castle, so he was before his time, making sure that this was something that would go down in Australian history.

Many have spoken about the difficulty for young people to get into a home, and this bill does nothing to address that. It should be not a partisan issue but something that's of concern to every party because the path to homeownership has become harder. Again, this bill does nothing to help that.

Homeowners, or households, are a group that are paying a larger share of their income in interest than they did in the 1980s, despite the fall in rates. We hear the horror stories from our parents about what the 1990s were like, and I remember those stories. I remember seeing those bills. Indeed, my father still has a clip of what the interest rates were in the 1990s.

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