James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moreton for his contribution, particularly for outlining some of the deficiencies in the policy positions of the Greens when it comes to housing, but I caution the member for Moreton that the last time those opposite did anything on housing in this chamber they ended up negotiating with the Greens and agreeing on half of their crazy policies in the Senate, before the Housing Australia Future Fund came back to be passed with all of the kooky demands of the Greens. Whilst it's nice to hear those opposite currently being cognisant of the frightening approach to housing that is encapsulated by the policy positions of the Greens, I predict there's a very good chance that the government will be negotiating with the Greens on this bill, because they have to—to give it any chance of passing in the Senate, they're going to sit down with the Greens and go through this list of Greens policies, which, as the member for Moreton just pointed out, are dangerous and unsustainable for the market. We'll find out, I suppose, what sort of a price has to be paid by the government to get support for this housing policy, much like we did when the Housing Australia Future Fund came back to this chamber last year.

We in the coalition hold the same concern about the approach of the Greens. Equally, I am greatly heartened to hear the government now saying that their concerns, when it comes to addressing challenges in the housing sector, are those of supply. In the last parliament, I served on the Standing Committee on Tax and Revenue inquiry into housing affordability, and certainly the coalition's position, which can be read in the report of that committee, was that supply was the No. 1 challenge when it came to housing affordability within our economy. The Labor Party members, then in opposition, had a different view back then—and I'm talking about only two years ago—than they do now in government. The housing minister said in question time in the last sitting week that the solution was 'supply, supply, supply'. Well, that was what we had to say in our report, and the Labor Party members disputed that very forcefully through the evidence as it was being heard, the questions that were asked and the witnesses that were being interrogated. The then opposition now government's own position on that inquiry—Alan Kohler quotes their previous position in that report in an essay that he wrote recently with a degree of significance on this topic. The government now say that the challenges are supply, supply, supply.

It would be great to see some policy positions from the government that are about supply, because we in the coalition certainly hold the view that supply is the great challenge, and solving it has a great deal of complexity, and not a lot of it is in the hands of the Commonwealth government. We obviously know that state governments and even local governments have a very significant role to play when it comes to the main levers of supply, which are land release and the rezoning of land, putting blocks out into markets so that hopefully you can get a matching of the supply of housing stock to the demand for it. We certainly have a government that is dramatically increasing migration into the country, putting an enormous amount of pressure on the housing sector not just from a supply point of view but from a cost point of view as well.

There are a lot of things that could be done on those levers. But, as we found in question time today, there are no solutions or suggestions of any adjustments to those policy settings from the answers to the questions that were asked. So we now have a solution where the main lever, that being supply, is not on the government's agenda whatsoever, and we have a housing bill before us here, this Help to Buy bill, which does nothing to increase the supply of new housing stock into the market.

The Liberal Party is the party of homeownership, and it was the great Sir Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party, of course, who in his 'Forgotten people' speech talked about the aspiration of homeownership and the great sense of economic security and economic empowerment that a family gets from owning their own home. Indeed, his government transformed the statistics when it came to homeownership for Australians. That was a great, golden era of prosperity, when people had a reasonable expectation of job security and housing security by purchasing a home, paying it off with a fair degree of stability and therefore having independence for themselves and their family.

We know that the Left of politics—and the Greens are embodying this and at least being honest about it right now—don't want people to have that kind of economic security. They want people to be reliant on government. If you're in the Left of politics and you love big government, you want people to rely on government and you want people to need big government to look after them and do everything for them. If you're in the Right of politics, you want people to have economic independence so that they can make their own decisions about themselves, their family and their future and not be reliant on government as frequently and as broadly as possible.

That's what homeownership achieves for someone. If you've got a stable job and income; if you own your own home, with debt to a bank but at a sustainable level so that you know you're going to be able to pay it off before you get to the end of your career; and indeed—I add the third pillar—if you've got superannuation and savings for your retirement so that you can support yourself comfortably in retirement, then you've got economic security and a great deal of economic independence. That's why the aspiration to homeownership is so important, and it's great shame that we don't have policy measures and bills coming before this parliament that are addressing that in any meaningful way whatsoever.

I commend the lead coalition speaker on the bill, the member for Deakin, for how he has articulated the coalition's position—in particular, what he discussed about the serious drawbacks and concerns that we have when it comes to this shared-equity scheme. There are a lot of questions that he put on the record that maybe the minister might address in the second-reading conclusion speech. We'll wait and see. But we have significant concern about a range of elements of the detail of this, which the lead speaker articulated.

We don't want people to get trapped in this scheme. We don't want people to be tricked into this scheme, not fully understanding what they might be exposed to because we have no idea what the consequences might be for a range of scenarios that are not outlined in any way, shape or form in the specifics of the legislation here and may or may not come in the regulations et cetera that are yet to be revealed to us. We certainly don't want to see people who are most vulnerable economically being trapped and/or tricked by a scheme like this. We know that the states hold the levers in this area of policy, which is why the Commonwealth government needs the states to participate in this. The states are the only ones that can ultimately enact it. A lot of the states have their own shared equity schemes that are dramatically undersubscribed. 'Undersubscribed' is a euphemism for 'not working'. There are plenty of schemes operating around the country that are offering to participate in a shared equity framework from state governments that people are just not signing up to. Why is it that this scheme is going to be any different from the state schemes, one wonders.

There are two essential challenges to purchasing your home: saving the deposit and, of course, meeting the cost of servicing the mortgage. We know that both of those are as challenging as each other for people in the current economic climate. High interest rates mean that, when banks look at serviceability of mortgages, the amount that they can lend to people has reduced dramatically through the interest rate hike cycle that we've seen since this government came to power. Of course, there is a very hot property market, which is driven by a lot of factors, including the very high immigration rate, and running a very high level of demand for property, both rental and purchasing, at the same time that supply isn't matching it means that the growth in the average price of a home makes not only meeting the mortgage but also saving for the deposit very challenging.

This scheme talks about very low levels of minimum equity in a home, and we know that banks are very comfortable when you've saved about 20 per cent of the equity for the capital purchase price of a home. That's how you can ensure you don't get things like mortgage insurance costs et cetera, and it puts people in the best position to be competitive in getting the lowest rate and having the safest level of borrowing and burden on them. When we think of all the other taxes that are put in place, particularly by state governments, like stamp duty et cetera, to save 20 per cent of the value of the average home right now is bitterly challenging for people. Then to have thought, 'This is what I need to save in order to buy a home,' and in the current market find that the sort of home you want to buy has dramatically increased in cost over the last two to five years that you might have been saving that equity and then equally find that the amount you were planning on borrowing is not going to be approved by the bank anymore because the amount that interest rates have gone up in that same period of time means that your income now can't support the mortgage burden that it could a few years ago—literally millions of Australians have had the dream of homeownership evaporate on them over the last 18 months to two years. This bill does absolutely nothing for those people, and some speakers talk about this being a pillar of the government's housing policy. If this is a pillar policy to address something as dramatic as the housing affordability crisis in our economy, that is absolutely shameful.

Even in success—and we dispute the likelihood of success of this bill—this will help 10,000 people a year to buy a home, and this is a pillar of the government's approach to addressing housing affordability and helping all those people with a dream of owning their own home and getting the economic security of homeownership. A pillar of the government's approach is, in success, helping 10,000 people a year buy a home. This problem stretches into the millions. There are millions of people who have dreams to buy homes that are unfulfilled.

We've had all sorts of claims and promises, particularly in election campaigns, about things that this is government is going to do, and they always involve things like hitting all these heroic targets that are miraculously beyond the election cycle. Unfortunately, we can't mark any report card on these sorts of things come the next election. All these things are going to be achieved in the years and years beyond that. This is another example of that. The government has delayed the introduction of this legislation. This scheme was meant to be starting in January 2023, and, just to be clear, it's February 2024 and we're debating it in the lower house, to be negotiated and potentially passed, or not, in the Senate probably in months and months time. That will mean the success of this policy will not be known whenever the next election is held.

The pollsters probably said to the campaign strategists: 'Housing affordability is a big deal; we've got to have some policy positions on it. Think of something that you can say that will sound good on a TV commercial and look good on a billboard, but, of course, has no substance or likelihood of making any dent in the significant challenge of this policy area.' This bill is exactly in that category. I suspect it was dreamt up in the heat of the election campaign because someone said, 'We don't have anything to say on housing and housing affordability,' and this was the best they could come up with when no-one did the hard, dedicated policy work of coming up with genuine, serious solutions to this very substantial, significant challenge we face. That's not dissimilar to a lot of other things that were said by the Labor Party at the last election.

We don't support this bill. We know that there is a huge challenge when it comes to housing affordability and people accessing and achieving the great Australian dream. And it should be more than just a dream; it should be a reality for all Australians to have an ambition to own their own home. It would be good for the government to bring some legislation before this parliament that would actually have a likelihood of making any form of meaningful impact on that. This certainly doesn't. We don't support it, and I won't support the second reading passage of the bill.

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