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

It's always a pleasure to follow my good friend the member for Moreton. I always take his contribution on face value, but I'd like to think he's being somewhat optimistic on what the government's housing plans are actually going to achieve. I'll say to the member for Moreton: come down to the electorate of Forde and see how many houses are being built. The issue is that this government is letting—or has let, in the past two years—over a million people into this country. We cannot build houses quickly enough to keep up with the population growth that this government is presiding over. It doesn't matter which way you cut the cake; it just doesn't work.

Having a father who was a ceramic tiler, I, a bit like the member for Moreton, spent plenty of time on building sites and in the building industry over the years. So I well understand what is required to build the number of houses that those opposite propose to build. In my area, though it's probably not so much of an issue in some areas, the cost of a block of land is $300,000 to $350,000. The average house size is 200 to 250 square metres and, at somewhere around $3,000 a square metre, the numbers start to add up pretty quickly. If you start to divide those numbers, in what those opposite are proposing to invest, you don't get very many houses whatsoever. That's the problem for the government: their figures never add up. They sound good on the surface, but, when you dig into the details, they never add up.

We've now seen the kite-flying exercise by the Treasurer, or some other senior Labor person who wishes to remain nameless, about negative gearing. They might be interested to know that, in my electorate of Forde, some 35 per cent of the population rent, according to the 2021 census, which is a little bit above the Queensland average of 33 per cent and reasonably above the Australian average of 30 per cent. If they want to take negative gearing out of the equation, those opposite might need to take a history lesson. That was floated back in the mid-1980s, and how long did that policy last? Six months, before it was reversed. Why? Because people bailed out of investment properties.

Can I also suggest to the minister regarding her remarks earlier, where she talked about tenants' rights et cetera, that plenty of the states are doing a lot of work in that space, and the people I've spoken to who have had investment properties are bailing out of the investment properties because of those very tenants' rights problems that are now being created by state governments. Everywhere we look, the government say one thing and they propose one thing but the reality is that the outcomes for the average Australian are the opposite.

If you have a look at the statistics, 90 per cent of people who own investment properties own two or fewer investment properties, according to the 2021 data. So, I don't know what problem they are trying to solve.

Well, you're not going to solve supply, Member for Lyons; you're going to make it worse. And talking about Help to Buy, in Queensland there's a state scheme already, and I think there's a state scheme in WA. There's a plethora of help-to-buy schemes around the country that are not being very popularly used; they're all undersubscribed. The best thing the government can do is focus on improving the supply chains, reducing the costs in our economy, reducing the inflation rate, getting out of the way, and reducing the immigration levels so that our market can keep up. (Time expired)

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