David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. This bill was announced with much fanfare. I note that the Prime Minister was actually here in the chamber to talk to this bill, so it does signify the importance of this to the government. But this is the latest iteration of many policy announcements to address the housing crisis, both the availability of housing and the affordability of housing.

Unfortunately, it will be another lame duck scheme that will attract very little interest. Why do I say that? I'm not trying to be pessimistic; I'm just trying to be realistic. There are multiple shared equity schemes already that the states run, quite appropriately, because under the Constitution the states have the head of powers and the responsibility for public housing and for housing regulation. New South Wales has 6,000 places on its scheme, with 30 per cent equity being offered for existing homes and 40 per cent for new homes. Victoria has a scheme as well, only it has 13,000 places. South Australia's HomeStart shared equity scheme is smaller but it is out there. Western Australia has a shared ownership scheme via their home loan lender called Keystart, and Tasmania has the MyHome shared equity scheme. What do they all have in common? They have in common very poor take-up by people who are meant to benefit from them, and the reason is people have done the sums. It's a bad deal, even with the initial concept of not having to pay interest on large amounts of capital. Who would feel comfortable with that? A family's home is their castle, but they wouldn't own it all! They're going to end up with as little as 60, 70 or 75 per cent equity, depending on what scheme and which state they're in.

The deal is that you pay 100 per cent of the transaction cost, the stamp duty and all the legal fees, but the government owns a sizeable chunk of it. Under the rules of the scheme, you also only get your portion of the capital gain and the government gets proportionally more because they don't share any of the stamp duty or legals. And it traps buyers with an income ceiling to remain eligible. If they earn more than $90,000 per year as a single person, or $120,000 as a couple, for two years in a row, all of a sudden they get 'please explain' letters and have to pay back some of it. And if you really get a wage rise, or your business takes off and you're doing well, you might have to pay up in full. So a lot of people who thought they were going to be in a stable situation with a long time to pay off their equity, paying increments slowly, could be short-changed. It's also a bit of a worry because a lot of people are going into a scheme when they don't really have enough capital behind them. If you're paying your own insurance for your loan, which is another thing that's insisted upon, that could cost you up to $30,000 over the duration of the loan.

For those of you don't understand it, a shared-equity scheme means that the government puts up some of the capital and has a covenant over a portion of your property. The reason that the states run it, as I mentioned, is because it's their constitutional duty to be involved in this. Community housing has become a bit of a hybrid situation, where philanthropic groups that build houses to rent have taken over from classic housing commission as the predominant community 'not owned, but rented space'. We have existing large schemes to give that section of the building industry low-interest loans. This government is continuing that great initiative, the National Housing Infrastructure Facility, which offered billions of dollars and developed and delivered thousands of cheaper homes for rent. And once you're in the community housing space, Commonwealth Rent Assistance kicks in from the federal government.

The other problem with this scheme is that it's not going to affect affordability favourably. In fact, it may increase the price of homes. As we know, there's a short supply issue, and this initiative is not addressing the shortage in supply. It will not curtail demand, it will probably increase demand—although the reluctance of buyers will limit that. As I mentioned, in our federal Constitution there is no mention of housing. That's why we also need to seek approval from the states for this system to go ahead. The state treasurers must be licking their lips and rubbing their hands together, thinking: 'Here we go! We can now cost shift some of our responsibilities over to the Commonwealth,' as they have done successfully in public education and public hospitals over the last 15 or 20 years. They used to be responsible and run it all, but now the Commonwealth is treasurer for many of the state responsibilities. That's a major problem for our Federation, because we have different responsibilities; we have welfare payments, the NDIS, Defence and all these other things, and the federal budget can't be expected to pay for six states and two territories as well. But, hey presto! Where we've ended up is that we're responsible for half of this.

Having the federal government trying to fix housing shortages is a bit of a moot point.

There were initiatives when former prime minister Morrison was the Treasurer and responsible for housing. He released some federal land in Sydney, Melbourne and, I think, Brisbane—I'd need to check the records. That is a great initiative because that's half the problem. The states need to release more land. Local councils need to rezone more land for housing. The federal government effect is accepted, and people take it, but it's not going to fix the fundamental problem, which is mainly in the domain of humble local councils and state governments. That's where I think we should be focusing to get these costs down.

As I mentioned, in a country town like the many I have, the rate-limiting step to getting housing developed is getting development applications approved by the council. It might take a year or more, let alone getting a construction certificate and getting new areas rezoned. It's laboriously slow. Builders in my region are tearing their hair out. There is money for affordable housing through community housing approval, and there are private landowners that would develop that in a flash for those community and affordable housing providers, but, again—hey, presto—it's not held up because of anything the federal government's doing or anything the state government's doing; it's the local council. That is what is really frustrating people around Australia. There is overregulation of simple development. Also, local councils are pretty much refusing to do any of the major headworks even though they end up getting an income stream of rates for generations to follow. They put it all onto developers.

Depending on which state you're in—in New South Wales, for instance—with a new area set aside for developing housing, often the land developer has to buy the same amount of land to offset clearing for housing, so poor land buyers or first home owners are paying for two blocks of property. The one that's offset is a cost on their property. The developer has to do the NBN development and telecommunications in the block, obviously, but, if there is major sewerage work or new water supplies, councils are now adding those responsibilities, which are in the DNA of local government to do.

We have all these other things barrelling down at the construction industry such as same-job same-pay and closing-loopholes bills, which are going to put many self-employed, subcontracting tradesmen in the situation of being looped into being an employee, which they are not happy about. They certainly don't want to be paying $17,000 more for their next ute or their light commercial vehicles, which is coming barrelling out of this Labor government. The states and councils really need to get their act together.

The other issue is that state governments and councils are allowing in our metropolitan areas this unstoppable urban sprawl, which is not good use of land. It's not good economics. I know a house-and-land package is everyone's dream, but, with the costs and the lack of infrastructure, we really need to do more urban consolidation. We need to re-assess the heights of domestic buildings. There are plenty of cities the size of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane that have houses quite regularly three storeys high. You might have several families in them. The quarter-acre block is a gone thing unless you're really moving out into the regions.

In the vein of consolidating valuable urban land, I suggest that the useless bits of land, maybe the size of these desks here in parliament, between each house to make them separated buildings, would be better used by making semi-detached buildings, taking that dead space between each house and putting it into footpaths or big urban squares over the whole development. Semidetached houses were a really effective use of land when they were built at the turn of the century. Many smart builders are looking at this, but we should be insisting on it.

The other thing we can be doing is hiding in plain sight. Regional Australia is crying out for more people to come and grow the regions. You can have an affordable house-and-land package. We need companies that pay above award, with high costs to get good workers moving to regional Australia, but we need state and local governments to allow for more water storage, land rezoning and land release and also to make sure that there are things set aside for services when they develop these lands. Those are things like community shops, petrol stations or a connection for bus routes or trains. One of the things that we were great at doing in the last two governments was getting up schemes like the First Home Super Saver Scheme, where you could put a maximum of $50,000 of your superannuation—not more than half your superannuation—into your first home deposit. There were 300,000 people on the first home loan insurance guarantee. Single mums, single parents and women who were going for their first home benefited from all those coalition policies. Some of them continue under a new name, with a bit more capital thrown in. But that's what we should be doing rather than this well-intentioned but half-baked and muddle-headed thinking about shared equity.

The states have shown it doesn't work. We need to fix the fundamentals, increase the supply of housing, make it easier to develop at the state and local government levels and insist on this from states at the equivalent of COAG meetings. Then we will see better things happening in land and housing prices. The other thing is that we must stop this rampant, unchecked immigration that is not sustainable while we're in the middle of a housing crisis. We need to really shrink it to highly skilled workers and refugees and leave it at that.

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