Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Help to Buy Bill 2023 is definitely a bill that impassions the spirits of both sides of the House. Madam Deputy Speaker, you have heard from speaker after speaker in this place from the coalition about our enthusiasm for Australians to own their own homes. It is in our DNA. It is etched in the genesis of our political party, through Sir Robert Menzies himself. You've heard that time and time again from different speakers who have prosecuted their contributions here today.

So, rather than continue along the lines of previous speakers, I thought I would take a slightly different tack with this debate and talk about my own personal experience with entering the housing market. Then I want to talk, through the prism of Queensland, about some of the issues that we have up there and contrast the policies that we have as a coalition with those of the government. I will reiterate through this speech how our policies when we were in government helped no fewer than 300,000 homeowners into the market.

During this speech, I will touch on the fact that the Help to Buy policy, which we're debating now, is contingent on states approving and adopting a similar model in their own jurisdictions. This legislation is not autonomous throughout the country. It needs other legislative instruments to attach itself to, and that becomes problematic because, as you've heard from previous speakers, those legislative instruments that may be in different states are underutilised, so, if there are spaces available for participants and states to take up, they're not adopting them. They're not flavoursome. It is the equivalent of thinking that the way we're going to get record sales in a car yard is to promote the ugliest and most unroadworthy vehicle in the fleet and that that's somehow going to turn our sales fortunes around. This is what this speaks to.

My wife and I bought our first home in a small town called Blackwater in Central Queensland. It's not a big town, but do you know what? It's what we could afford. I think I was 22 or something when we bought it, and we paid $55,000 for it. It was a high-set three-bedroom HardiePlank, brick based, with a two-car double lock-up tilter garage door. It backed onto the golf course. It had polished floors, a basic kitchen and an internal stairwell. There was a rumpus room downstairs. It was a reasonable home. At that point in time, I had trouble raising the deposit for a $55,000 home.

As I continue on this story, I don't want people to take away from this that I'm saying the secret to homeownership is to head to the regional areas, but I do want to shine a light on those regional areas that would embrace families and that the median house prices in regional areas are often much lower than they are in our capital city CBDs, when you do your analysis. It's not as if you're asking Blackwater people to go and live in a community where the median wage is low. This is a mining town. There are three to four coal mines owned by multinationals and private companies in which the median wage is north of $150,000 for the entire township. When you've got two revenues coming into a house, a double-income household, you can save.

Before I came in to deliver this speech, I went on realestate.com.au and had a quick look at what price you could buy house in Blackwater for these days. For houses with a similar description to the house that I bought, you can still pick one up for $220,000, which would be the median. Some are higher, up to $300,000, but they're not overly expensive. Homeownership is within the grasp of people, but the equation of getting there has become—and the expectations. It's spoken about in RSLs and with Rotary and Lions community groups in my electorate, who say to me: 'The expectations on the next generations are much greater than what we had when we first bought our home. Our first home may not have had a concrete driveway, may not have had curtains and certainly may not have had carpets in it.' But the homes today, when we calculate the median home price, are often based on the assumption that they have four bedrooms, two bathrooms and double car lock-up, and are lowset brick, fully fenced, turfed and air-conditioned with every possible extra that generations before may have taken some time to get to.

In Queensland, we have a situation where we need 48,000 houses built a year. Currently the market is at full noise reaching 34,000. So we're 14,000 houses short at the moment, and what this debate on the Help to Buy bill allows us to do is address the demand and supply push. We'll be opposing this, and all the speakers on the coalition have made that point abundantly clear. We'll be opposing this bill because we just can't work out how it addresses the supply side of the argument. When I talk to builders, the ones that haven't gone broke recently—and Madam Speaker, as you would well know, if you turn the television on and watch the news cycle, it's with awkward regularity that we're seeing building companies collapse, under this government. It is with awkward regularity that we're seeing local builders go broke, under this government. It's just shameful that we're seeing this spike in builders leaving the industry since Labor came to power.

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