Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hereby formally second the motion. Yesterday, I highlighted affordability, along with my colleague from Tasmania. I would have heard this word maybe a thousand times so far this year in this parliament. I defy anyone to point out a single action taken, or proposed, by the opposition that would deal with affordability.

What the federal government is proposing will increase demand. I would draw their attention to a paper put out by Malcolm Turnbull, no less, and an Oxford don—who happened to be an Australian and was a professor at Oxford. They said that governments continuously solve the housing problem by increasing demand, like, 'We'll give you a five per cent interest rate,' or, 'We'll give you a $10,000 encouragement fee to get your own home.' All this increases demand but does nothing whatsoever to increase supply. At least here, in the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Foreign Entities Bill 2024, we are curtailing the demand very, very significantly. The honourable member for Calare has outlined the degree of penetration into the Australian housing market by foreign investors. A foreign investor wants to park his money somewhere. I've seen numerous examples of that in North Queensland—investments that couldn't possibly ever make money but very safe investments. We've only got so many house builders. We've only got the provision of so many house-building supplies in this country. If they're being mopped up by foreigners to build houses that they really don't want anyone to live in, then, of course, you're dramatically exacerbating the housing market. It's not as if prohibition is some extreme measure. Our cousins in Canada have already done it. In a country where the price of a house now in Brisbane is over $120,000, the price of a house in Sydney is over $1.2 million and the price of a house in Melbourne is over $1 million, how can any person with the average take-home pay of near enough to $100,000—he pays $25,000 of that in tax; he's got a take-home pay of $75,000—buy a house for a million dollars? I don't know. Of course, they're not.

One of the very unpleasant outcomes of this is that young couples are saying, 'Well, we're just going to wait until we've got enough money to get a house and settle down properly.' They don't ever get the money to buy a house, so they don't have any children, so now we are a vanishing race. When the figures come out this year, you'll find that, when 20 Australians die, they're replaced by 16 people. That's a great achievement by the Liberal Party and the Labor Party! You have now imposed upon us that we're a vanishing race of people. You need a house to settle down.

One of my great ambitions in life was to have a couple of acres surrounding my house, where we could toss a football around and play a bit of rugby league in the backyard, even if it was only touch football. There would be a bit of space to grow some trees. We didn't have a single tree on our acreage. Now there are over a thousand native trees on our acreage. We've got a beautiful quarter acre. When all the family are home, we play touch football and have a lot of fun. It's very, very civilised. The beautiful thing about this country is that it's an empty country. Go 150 kilometres west of Sydney, and you can fire a machine gun or drop atomic bombs all the way across to the Indian Ocean and not kill anyone, because there's no-one living there. That's the wonderful thing about Australia.

Our party in Queensland—if they get the balance of power this year—will lift the speed limits to 125 kilometres per hour on divided, safe highways, and that will enable people to live further out on giant spoke roads. What the member of parliament is doing, new as he is to this place, is a wonderful thing for his country. I salute him and back him very, very strongly in trying to help Australians to get their own homes— (Time expired)

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