Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I quite like the member for Bennelong. But I have to say that while I said I quite like the member for Bennelong I didn't say that I liked his contribution to this debate. I think he's rather living in hope. I might remind the member for Bennelong and some of those newer members in this House, that constitutionally the responsibility for housing belongs to the state governments.

I'll give him a little bit of a life example of what has happened in Queensland. For the past 35 years, Queensland has been governed by a state Labor government. I remember in my early days in the banking industry, on a Thursday when people got paid their pensions or their Centrelink allowances they would come in and pay their social housing payments. You had two types of payments. The first type of payment was for people who were on a rent-to-buy scheme. We have seen over the years those people successfully own their own home, and great credit to them and the effort that they have taken. They've worked hard to get to a point where they own their own property. The other scheme was for those who were renting. The rent was limited to approximately 30 per cent of those people's incomes.

I represent an area that the member for Bowman would well know because it includes places that are also in his electorate like Eagleby, Kingston, Woodridge and Capalaba. It even includes areas in and around Beenleigh and Browns Plains, which are in the Treasurer's electorate. Those areas were where the Queensland Housing Commission built numerous homes during the sixties and seventies for people to either go into on a rent-to-buy scheme or to rent. Can I say that until the last couple of years I'd seen very, very little done in the intervening 20 or 30 years by the Queensland Housing Commission to replace the stock that was bought or that people eventually owned—and credit to those people for their hard work and effort, as I said before. But the Queensland government under Labor leadership and the Queensland Housing Commission didn't see fit to reuse those funds to build new properties to replace the ones that came out of the system. We have seen an ongoing discussion over the last number of years about the quality of the remaining Queensland Housing Commission properties there are for rent because the Queensland Housing Commission has failed miserably to upkeep those properties.

The Prime Minister, in his contribution earlier, referenced housing commission towers I believe in Carlton, in Melbourne. They tell a similar story of woe—that the Victorian state government has failed to maintain those properties in a manner in which they are fit for people to live in. Now we have the situation where our state governments are turning around and saying, 'Oh well, it's not our problem.' They pass the buck to the federal government, and we finish up with schemes like this to try and solve a problem that is entirely of the making of the state governments because of their failure to continue to provide social and affordable housing since the mid-eighties. It's about time the state governments stepped up and took some responsibility for their failure in that space.

In addition to their failure in that space, they have failed to ensure that our planning schemes have kept pace with the needs of a growing community, and they have failed to see that our infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the needs of our growing communities. As the member for Bowman would know, as the member for Capricornia, who is at the table, would know, we have a multitude of infrastructure problems right across south-east Central and North Queensland as our communities have grown and our population has grown. But the state governments have been asleep at the wheel. They seek to continually shift responsibility and an expectation to the federal government to solve the problems that they have failed to deal with that are actually their responsibility. So let's actually shoo home that responsibility to where it belongs.

Now, that brings me to this bill. What can I say. Before I came in here tonight I just checked with a builder of mine, and this program covers whether you buy an existing house or you want to buy a new house and land package. Some of those suburbs that I mentioned earlier—Woodridge, Kingston and Marsden in the Treasurer's electorate and Eagleby in my electorate. I was talking to a real estate agent out Marsden way the other day. A fairly rundown modest three-bedroom fibro house is $700,000 plus. I don't know what it is Capalaba or Alexandra Hills, Member for Bowman, but I suspect it's not that far away. In Eagleby, it's sort of $600,000 or thereabouts.

I just had a look at Park Ridge. Park Ridge South is where the new development area is in my electorate. I was speaking to the builder, as I said earlier, and they said it's roughly $400,000 for a block land. For a modest house that's 150 square metres, three bedroom, nothing special—now, that's not generally a house that's built these days. Generally people want four bedrooms, a study and all the bells and whistles. At $3,000 per square metre to build a modest 150 square metre home with a nice but not over-the-top fit-out is $450,000. If you add that to your $400,000 block of land, it's $850,000 plus stamp duty, legal fees and all those other things. I ask the question: even with a fund like this, how many of these people who are struggling to save for a deposit will be able to afford it? At $850,000 that's a deposit somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 in round figures, looking at stamp duty of another $15,000 even with the concessions they get from the state government. So now you're at somewhere around $30,000 to $35,000 as a minimum requirement before anything else.

As a number of other people have said, these programs at a state level remain unfulfilled. So why is the federal government stepping in to provide an additional program which already exists at a state level which the public doesn't take up? Why would you repeat a mistake that's already being made? Why would you repeat something that the homebuying public doesn't want? That just makes no sense to me whatsoever. I would far rather see state governments held to account to undertake their constitutional responsibility and for the federal government to introduce some KPIs and say to them: 'You go and build your social and affordable housing and then you send us the bill. We're not going to give you the money until such time as you actually build these houses.' I can tell you that, if you give the money to the state governments, you can't trust that they won't put it into consolidated revenue and it won't go somewhere else. We've seen plenty of that over the years. So hold the feet of the state governments to the fire and actually get them to do what they're supposed to do constitutionally. That would be a far better solution in my book. But we aren't seeing that. We're seeing a big song and dance about rolling out a new program that for all intents and purposes I don't think is going to achieve the outcomes that are being sought. If you look at $5.5 billion over 10,000 people, that's $550,000 per person. That's an expensive exercise, not that I think it's going to go that far or have that many people take it up.

We do need to encourage people and give people the opportunity to own their own home or, if they're not in a situation to own their own home, have a secure roof over their head, paying a level of rent they can afford. Nobody in this House disagrees with that proposition—nobody. But I don't believe that this bill as it's currently constructed without the relevant KPIs to force the state governments to do their job of providing social and affordable housing will achieve the results we're seeking to achieve.

I'm proud of the measures that we took when we were in government to try and encourage homeownership through providing grants and/or guarantees. Interestingly, the only thing that this government has so far successfully done in this space is continue those programs that were set up by the coalition government. This program was supposed to be up and running, I believe, a year or so ago. So I don't think the government are even really convinced that it can do the job that they have proposed that it can do.

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