Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance which concerns the threat to the tax treatment of negative gearing. We saw in the Sydney Morning Herald last week confirmation that Labor has been secretly modelling changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing rules. This proves that Labor is at war with the Australian dream of homeownership. Indeed, Labor is even at war with the dream of private rentals. What they are proposing with these changes is to increase the tax on homes.

Why do governments bring in taxation? Why do governments impose taxes on certain items? It is because they want to change consumer behaviour in some way. Witness, for example, the massive taxation on cigarettes—something that I support—in order to discourage people from buying cigarettes by simply making them too expensive. I note that both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have previously ruled out making any changes to taxes on housing. Why the Treasurer or whoever is secretly obtaining modelling is beyond me.

I agreed with almost everything that the member for Macquarie just said. She identified all of the current problems that we have with housing. She identified supply. She identified construction costs. She identified how expensive it now is for the current generation to buy a property as opposed to her generation and generations that have gone before. But what the member for Macquarie failed to do was to identify how this government, after 2½ years, has in any way increased the supply of housing and brought down the cost of housing. In my electorate, in southern and south-western Sydney, housing prices have not gone down one single bit. First of all, those who are lucky enough to already be in homeownership have had 12 interest rate rises in a row, causing them to pay more than $35,000 in additional interest rate payments. My electorate knows—from Illawong to Ingleburn, from Bonnet Bay to Bangor and Bundeena, from Heathcote to Hammondville, from Moorebank to Macquarie Fields—that, whether they are buying a house, paying off a mortgage or renting, those prices have significantly increased. Just last week, I was out at Holsworthy, and I met some people in tears, who said, 'We have to move out of this three-bedroom townhouse because the rent has now gone up in 18 months'—of a Labor federal government—'by $150 to $750.' That is out of their ability to pay.

I think we should just look at some actual stats around negative gearing. Let's do a bit of fact finding around negative gearing. According to the Australian Taxation Office, 90 per cent of those that utilise negative gearing—and there are around 2.25 million Australians that do—have two investment properties or fewer; 71 per cent have only one. When we drill down to who those Australians are, many of them are middle-income Australians. They're teachers, they're nurses, they're plumbers and they're builders. They are the people that often buy an investment property to prepare for their future. While we are talking about plumbers and those that work in the construction industry, one of the other main issues that the government has not managed to fix, and which has indeed been exacerbated under this Labor government for 2½ years, is the cost of construction materials and the shortage of workers in the construction industry. That has also been one of the biggest drivers of the massive increase in the cost of housing. Secretly modelling negative gearing changes and changes to the capital gains tax is simply putting another tax on— (Time expired)

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