Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. I am opposed to this bill, because I believe this isn't a serious attempt to solve what is a significant problem in Australia at the moment. Similar programs have caused problems. On this side, we are opposed to the principle of excessive government involvement in peoples' affairs, and there are too many unanswered questions in relation to this piece of legislation. There will be a lot of speeches in the House about the importance of homeownership, and nobody disagrees with that. But the conflation of housing affordability with the scheme proposed in this bill is disappointing, and—if I could make an observation, being a new member of parliament—it's one of the bait-and-switch things that I see passing for debate in this place. It manifests itself in omnibus bills, where there'll be one good thing in it and about 50 things that are no good. People who are supporting it will castigate everyone, only talking about that one thing that everyone agrees on and not about the 50 things that are no good. But this follows that sort of logic. 'There is a problem, it needs a solution, and this is our proposed solution; therefore, this must be the solution.' It's worth noting that I don't think this particular solution is a solution to the housing crisis. It is a niche program and a flawed one. It's worth noting—and I will address this more in detail—that the only housing policies delivering support to first-home buyers, as borne out by my discussions with people in the industry and homebuyers in my electorate, are the housing policies that Labor inherited from the former coalition government.

What is Help to Buy? Help to Buy is a shared-equity scheme. It purports to make it easier for people to buy a home, but there's a catch. Your equity partner is the Australian government. It purports to be easier because eligible homebuyers are supported by the government. They don't have to contribute as much towards a purchase and so the deposit they require is smaller, as low as two per cent. With a shared-equity partner, they're saying you can get a home sooner or, more accurately, you can you get a loan sooner. But you'll also owe the government and they'll have to be paid back over time or when you sell.

Help to Buy will be open to only 10,000 households each financial year and will cost the Commonwealth $5.5 billion. That's if it reaches its targeted take-up. We have serious doubts about this because Australians don't love shared-equity schemes, especially when their equity partner is the government. The majority of states already offer their own shared-equity products, and these schemes are so unwanted by many Australians that there are places remaining in each of the available state based schemes. If they are not popular with Australians, why have one that comes from the federal government? Is it the case of being seen to do something?

The United Kingdom have had a help-to-buy scheme and it has been open to criticism. I'm not suggesting that this scheme that we are debating now is exactly the same as that UK help-to-buy scheme, but there are legitimate concerns that should be contemplated about what happened in the United Kingdom. We can look to them to see what some of the positives were but also what some of the perverse outcomes were. Graeme Leach, who is the chief economist at the Institute of Directors in the United Kingdom, described the scheme as 'dangerous' and said it would drive up prices. This was his quote in the Telegraph newspaper back in July 2013:

The housing market needs help to supply, not help to buy and the extension of this scheme is very dangerous. Government guarantees will not increase the supply of homes, but they will drive up prices at a time when it seems likely that house prices are already over-valued …

When the scheme is withdrawn any rise in prices that has taken place will be undermined, with potentially disastrous results. There is a real risk that the housing market will become dependent on the underwriting by government, making it very difficult politically to shut the scheme down.

Again, this is not the scheme we are debating. I concede that. But lessons can be learned from these government equity schemes in other parts of the world, and there are concerns about driving up house prices.

There are legitimate concerns that we have in the context of this bill. Will it contribute to further growth in house prices? Will it be found after five years of operation that three out of every five applicants who bought a home would have been able to afford it anyway, as was found by the UK National Audit Office on the UK scheme? Will it encourage those for whom homeownership may not be the most suitable option to take on undue financial risk? Could it divert resources from supporting people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness including because of rental stress?

There are a number of reasonable questions that we have in relation to this legislation that I think we should have answers to. What is the scheme's eligibility criteria? What happens when a person involved in this scheme makes improvements to their home? Will they have to send the government an invoice for repairs or maintenance? Will the government collect capital gains windfall based on the homeowner's investment in any improvements they've made? What happens if a person involved in the scheme earns a cent above $90,000 for an individual or $120,000 for a couple? Will the government force the sale of their home? Will the ATO be auditing incomes? If you participate in it, what are the reporting obligations? What happens if housing prices fall and you are behind with your mortgage payments? Will the government force you to sell your house for less than you paid for it? How many of the 40,000 places will be available in each state and territory? What lenders are participating in the scheme? These are all reasonable questions that I think should have been ironed out before bringing the bill into this place.

The question I think we need to ask when having this debate in a constructive way is: is there a better way of helping Australians realise their dream of homeownership? There are a few. There are some really good ones that were implemented by coalition governments. The first one I've had discussions with people in my electorate about. That's the Home Guarantee Scheme. Over the last three years, the coalition government's housing policies have supported more than 300,000 Australians with the purchase of a home. Remember with this Help to Buy scheme we're talking about only 10,000 a year over four years, a fraction of what the coalition was achieving. The coalition supported almost 60,000 first home buyers and single-parent families into homeownership through the home guarantee schemes, consisting of the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme, the New Home Guarantee and the Family Home Guarantee, with deposits of as little as five per cent or two per cent. The coalition's Home Guarantee Scheme is now supporting one in three first home buyers. We protected the residential construction industry with more than 137 HomeBuilder grants, generating $120 billion in economic activity.

These raw numbers talk to the fact that there were some very positive things happening during the previous government's term, but it's not just the numbers of people; it's who it helped. Of the 60,000 guarantees issued under the home guarantee schemes, 52 per cent were taken up by women—well above the market average of 41 per cent. One in five guarantees went to essential workers, almost 35 per cent of which were nurses and 34 per cent of which were teachers. There is a worker accommodation shortage and there are difficulties, particularly in regional areas, caused by a lack of supply. That, in my view, is caused by red and green tape, which is a legacy of the way that our state and local governments operate sometimes. But we do need to look after essential and professional workers and encourage them into regional areas.

In addition, there was the very successful HomeBuilder scheme. During the COVID pandemic, more than 137,000 Australian families applied for the HomeBuilder grants of $25,000 towards a new or substantially renovated home. The scheme delivered a secure pipeline of construction work that kept hundreds of thousands of tradies and small businesses in work.

The real issue is affordability, and what is being done now and what could be done in the future. In metropolitan areas, affordability is becoming a problem. The lack of supply is pushing prices up, and incomes aren't keeping up, particularly with the inflationary problems that we have at the moment. In regional areas affordability is still there. I'll pick some figures out. You can buy a house in Shepparton, in my electorate, for $450,000, and there are successful couples that are doing very well, perhaps earning a household income of $120,000 to $150,000 a year. Homeownership is a real option there, and that's a really good thing. In my own experience—I won't tell you what I bought my first house for, but it wasn't much, because it was back in 2003. My wife and I weren't earning a lot of money back then, but we scrimped and saved to get together a deposit. We bought a small house in Shepparton, and we were able to service those mortgage repayments. We were fortunate enough to have professional jobs in regional areas.

I think we can debate these schemes: our scheme is better than yours and your scheme is better than ours, and here's a government that's prepared to own a bit of your home, which you think is a good idea and we disagree. But we need to look a bit larger when we think about homeownership in Australia and, indeed, where people are living and working in Australia. I hark back to my maiden speech. I talked about my vision—and many others' vision—for regional Australia, and Australia more generally, and the need to look at population rebalance in our nation. I believe there are too many people living in our cities. Our cities are growing fast and sprawling in an unplanned way. In Australia we've got cities heading towards five to six million people, such as Sydney and Melbourne. In some cases this growth is unsustainable, in relation to public transport and other facilities.

Look at a country like Germany, which has a population that's significantly larger than ours—over double. Instead of having these big megacities that are sprawling out, they have smaller, regional cities linked by high-speed rail and surrounding major manufacturing centres. I was there last year and I saw this myself. Wouldn't that be a better way to plan our nation—to plan where we put people and where we build houses? The growth and the strategic development of regional Australia is what we're about. That's one of the reasons I put my hand up to try and come into this parliament as a National Party member—I see the opportunity of regional Australia, what it can achieve and what we could do by having significant cities outside our major metropolitan areas, linked by high-speed rail, with thousands and thousands of professional people living and working.

I believe this relates to homeownership because it's a lot cheaper to set up these greenfield places outside regional cities than it is to continue to sprawl out of suburban Melbourne or Sydney. I think that would be a positive thing for our nation. What's holding that back is the planning regimes that developers have to go through to open up land to build houses. A farmer might be very happy to see a place outside a regional area that is currently a paddock be rezoned as a residential block. The process to go from there to the point where someone is actually able to pour a slab and build a house takes, in some cases, six to eight or 10 years, and that's not keeping up with the demand for houses in our nation.

We need to streamline that. It's the responsibility primarily of the state governments, but the federal government has got a role to play there too. We can ensure that we get more people living sustainably and, in my view, more people in regional areas, close to where they work and embedded in supportive and connected communities. You only need to come to some of the cities in my electorate, such as Shepparton, Echuca and Seymour, to see how that works. It works really well.

I think that government equity in people's home loans is not a good idea. I think that there are too many unanswered questions in the way this particular scheme is going to work, and I don't think it's a serious attempt to look at a big-picture vision of how we improve homeownership and population rebalance in our nation of Australia.

See this speech in context