Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Housing affordability is an important issue for Australia. However, we will not remedy it if we allow shallow anecdotes and lazy stereotypes to determine our response. In this respect, I was disappointed to read an article in this morning's Australian entitled 'Foreign buyers add 10 pc to home prices'. The article quoted assertions that 'foreign buyers' were purchasing homes in Australia at an alarming rate. The article cited a Melbourne buyer's agent as evidence. He was quoted as saying:

… it was easy to tell when buyers were unlawful foreign investors purchasing in their sons’ and daughters’ names because you could see them talking to their parents on the phone throughout the auction.

I represent an electorate with a large Asian-Australian population, and I recently bought a home in this area. Unsurprisingly, there were many Asian faces at the numerous property auctions that I visited in this process. Some of these Asian faces were members of my own family. According to Reserve Bank of Australia research published earlier this month, like my family, the vast majority of the Asian faces at these auctions would have been Australian citizens. This RBA reported noted that: 'Foreign residential purchases do not appear to have a major presence in the Australian property market' and that 'the degree of competition with foreign buyers is still likely to be fairly small.'

It takes more than a phone call to mum and dad and a few foreign words to determine someone's citizenship. We do our Asian-Australian community a great disservice when we allow ourselves to buy into this kind of baseless scaremongering and we distract ourselves from the real issues in the Australian housing market.