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

I'm not so old as to have seen it in the 1970s, to take the interjection! But when you look at those bills in the 1990s—that is etched into the psyche of people who can remember that. But homeowners now have larger debts, and it's important to assess them relative to both their income and their assets. As rates go up, they are still not near those levels of the 1980s and 1990s. But house prices, relative to income, are twice what they were a generation ago, and access to finance is harder—and it's getting harder all the time because of the decisions that are being made in this place and by this government. So we can accept as a statement of fact that the path to owning your own home is more difficult now than it ever has been. Young people are getting squeezed in many different ways. Interest rates are high and getting higher. House prices are dropping off, but they're still extraordinarily high.

When we look at the average family or the average house—and I'd like to single out millennials. I think I just skip the millennial generation; I'm of that long-forgotten generation, generation X. Millennials are our largest generation. If you wanted to buy, say, a $650,000 apartment in Melbourne—it's not a house. It's hard to get a house for that money. The mean price for a house is closer to a million dollars in many suburbs of Melbourne, and it goes up the closer you get to where you work in the city. But let's say you're on a salary of $70,000 or $72,000, which is often what graduates are on—forgetting all the debts that you owe after going to university—and you're an office manager or you have an administrative job. For that $650,000 apartment, it would take you 15 years and seven months to save a 20 per cent deposit. It's no wonder that many people give up, no wonder that so many people, particularly within a certain radius of our capital cities, are saying that homeownership is beyond them. The journey to homeownership has become an ultramarathon, if not a never-ending one, because that timeframe keeps getting pushed out. Purchasing power has not kept up with exploding property prices. Saving for a deposit on the average home in Sydney, where the member for Bennelong is from, is even worse. It would take many, many more years to save for the average apartment or the average house in Sydney.

We need to do more for young people. This bill won't do that. In fact, it will have an adverse affect on that aspiration. We know from the IMF that off-budget spending of $45 billion will have a detrimental impact on the economy. We know that interest rates must move in tune with fiscal policy. The Reserve Bank is independent and it has a role. The Reserve Bank is in this house this week—before the Senate today and before the House Standing Committee on Economics, which I'm a member of, as is the member for Bennelong. There is an important role for that independence and accountability to this place, but we must never forget the important role played by the people on the government benches, the important role in fiscal policy. You cannot have one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator. For every extra $6 billion of off-budget spending there is potentially a quarter of a percentage point rise to the cash rate. What will $45 billion do? And this bill is a key part of that $45 billion.

We have to ask what are the priorities of the Labor Party in bringing this forward, and that means we have to ask what are the priorities of the Treasurer. Many in this chamber and in the media have spoken about the Treasurer's essay. There are some wonderful parts about what the Treasurer is actually interested in. I enjoyed reading his essay, and I commend him for putting pen to paper. It is important that we hear from the executive members in long-form essay, because we get to see what is important to them. It's an essay long on cliches that I haven't seen since my undergraduate days but short on economics and short on a vision for a better future for younger Australians, and for younger Australians buying their own home. The Treasurer seeks to criticise neoliberalism without defining it. It's a dog whistle to his own party. It's a dog whistle to serve his own aspirations for further promotion. He talks about the Washington consensus and pooh-poohs it, but he doesn't define it and doesn't say which part about it he is criticising. He doesn't say which parts were a source of wealth and dragged millions, if not billions, of people out of poverty in the world. He goes back to the energy shocks of the 1970s and gives us a history lesson. But he then says some really concerning things: 'If we could redesign markets for investments in social purposes.' We all want better social outcomes in this country, but when somebody says 'redesign markets', and that someone is the Treasurer of the Commonwealth, we should be concerned. When that someone also talks about making sure that the allocation of capital has a government intervention, we should be concerned, because that person is not talking about redesigning capitalism. That person is talking about criticising it.

I could go on with all the different parts of the essay. Many of them have been repeated, including noting that 'We'—being the Labor government—'will renew and revitalise the Productivity Commission and renovate the Reserve Bank of Australia.' I'm sure the Treasurer isn't talking about a lick of paint or doing up that building in Sydney, which I urge you to go and visit, if you can. No, he's talking about something more insidious, and it is quite disturbing. When the Treasurer says it's not just our economic institutions that need renewing and restructuring but the way our markets allocate and arrange capital as well, I get concerned.

When I finished the essay, I wondered what else the Treasurer had written. He wrote a PhD thesis; he has a doctorate. I'll save everyone the time of looking at it. The doctorate is called 'Brawler Statesman'. That's a perfect title not just for Paul Keating but for the culture of the Labor Party. We see the Labor Party come in here one day and speak in hushed tones about our veterans and in hushed tones about how there is a unity ticket on foreign policy and defence. That's the statesman in some of you, and I commend you for it. Then, on other days, the brawler is on. The brawler comes in and shoots invective about how this side doesn't care about veterans and doesn't care about defence and national security. That's what we saw yesterday. The heart of this Labor Party is a contradiction. You don't know what you're going to get from one day to the next. It is a bipolar party that one day is a statesman and one day is a brawler, and we don't know who will come in on a particular day.

Let's look at this thesis. Here are the titles of the chapters. Chapter 1 is 'Brawler statesman'. The subchapter is 'Revisiting prime ministerial power'. I'd like to take you to a part of that. In the 'Outlines, aims and arguments' section, the Treasurer said:

The aim of the dissertation, therefore, is to isolate the power relationships central to the governing task and to draw some conclusions about the levers of power available to Keating specifically and then, more broadly, to Australian prime ministers in general.

It's to study the levers of power.

Chapter 2 is 'Prime ministerial leadership'. Again the focus is on power and the power debate. Chapter 3 is 'Leading Labor', which talks about the factions. Chapter 4 is 'Controlling cabinet'. You'll notice that there isn't any reference here to actual economics, values or having a better nation. Then there's 'Governing from the centre'.

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