Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Hume proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The threat to the tax treatment of negative gearing.

I call upon those honourable members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australian families are facing enormous economic and financial pain right now. For 18 months, we've seen a household recession in this country. For 18 months, GDP per capita has been going backwards, not forwards, and that's the economic growth measure that counts—GDP per capita—because that's what people feel. That's how their financial situation is affected. You can't cover it up by having over a million people come into the country and say, 'It's great. It's all fine,' because it's not. You've got GDP per capita going backwards in six consecutive quarters. Now, we haven't seen that since the early nineties, when, of course, Labor was in power. We haven't seen it in that state. At the same time, we've seen the standard of living of the average Australian family fall by just under nine per cent. The standard of living of Australians, their capacity to buy, has gone down 8.7 per cent in just over two years.

Of course, we know that is the worst in the OECD. We know that. There is no other country that has seen anything like that collapse in the standard of living. And we know that, sitting underneath that, the prices a working family are paying on average—their cost of living—have gone up by 18 per cent, way higher than their wages. Real wages have been dropping. We know they're paying 25 per cent more personal income tax than they were a couple of years ago, and we know they've seen 12 mortgage interest rate increases in that time. It's no wonder, then, that they've seen an absolute collapse in their standard of living.

Whilst we're seeing interest rates coming down in countries and regions across the world, we're not seeing it here. We're seeing interest rates coming down in the US, they're coming down in the UK, they're coming down in Canada, they're coming down in Europe, they're coming down in New Zealand—but not in Australia.

Australians are having to find a way through. They've cracked open the piggy bank. There are no savings anymore. They've stopped saving. They've essentially stopped saving. We know they're doing extra work. They're taking on extra hours, and that's unsustainable. They struggle to work out who's going to pick up the kids from school and who's going to find the time to do those chores around the house when they have to make extra income to make those extraordinary extra payments. We also know there's no pathway to improvement here for Australians.

But there's a problem here for the government. I mentioned earlier that a 25 per cent increase in personal income tax is being paid. We know there have been very high iron ore prices, just at the time when the government have been making it hard for mining companies to get approvals. We know that those personal income tax revenues and those commodity tax revenues that have been fuelling this government's spending habit—a 16 per cent increase in spending in just two years—are coming to an end. They're coming to an end, and, as they come to an end, the government have to find new pots of money. It seems they have been working on exactly that, because we saw, in the Sydney Morning Herald, confirmation that negative gearing and capital gains tax are in Labor's sights. Well, they're always in Labor's sights, but the Sydney Morning Herald picked it up this time. It was leaked by 'a senior Labor official'. Let me quote:

Federal officials have started work on options to scale back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, preparing the ground for a bold new housing policy that could define the federal election.

It goes on:

This masthead has confirmed with a senior Labor official, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely about internal policy development, that a request for modelling on the potential change to negative gearing has been made and that it could canvass changes to the concessions on capital gains tax.

Obviously, that's to the family home.

We know you can't trust Labor when it comes to tax—we know that—because we were told before the last election that they weren't going to make any changes to superannuation, yet we know they are bringing forward unrealised capital gains tax on Australians' super. They are unrealised capital gains. They're going to tax them. Where those small businesses and farmers who have their land in a self-managed super fund are going to find that money, we don't know. Labor don't know either. They don't care. Those on that side of the parliament have never been interested in small business and farmers. But we do know they're breaking a promise.

They're also breaking a promise on income taxes. We know that Australians are going to pay an extra $28 billion in bracket creep in coming years because of a broken promise from the Labor Party. We do know they've broken a promise on franking credits. Labor are targeting $1.5 billion of revenue from franking credits, through tax and regulatory changes. We know it's hardworking Australians who, over many, many years, have squirrelled away that money in their super funds and their savings who are going to end up paying for Labor's big-spending habit.

Deputy Speaker, this housing tax that Labor are going after is about more than just raising revenue. It is about raising revenue, because Labor always want to raise more revenue, but it's also about their vision for housing in this country. We know what their vision for housing in this country is—it's housing that you rent. It's not ownership. They don't believe in Australians owning their home. They want people to rent. They want them to rent apartments and they want those apartments to be built by the CFMEU. They want them to be built by the CFMEU, Deputy Speaker. They want them owned by big investment funds and they want mum-and-dad investors out of the way. We hear them talk regularly, those speaking out—and I'm sorry the member for Moreton is not here, because he's always speaking out on this; he's one who loves the idea of getting rid of negative gearing—and we know what they hate. They hate mum-and-dad investors who own three or four homes. But they're completely okay with a big industry super fund owning 3,000 or 4,000 homes. They're okay with that because that's their vision of housing in this country. That's their vision of housing in this country, and it's a vision that we absolutely don't share. We believe it is right and proper that a young family—a young builder, plumber, teacher, nurse—should be able to buy a home, invest in it for a period and then move into it or sell it. They sell it in many cases—and I see this in my home town—to someone who becomes an owner-occupier. This is a well-trodden path in this country, but it's not a path that those opposite believe in. It's not a view of how housing should work in this country that those opposite believe in either.

We know that the Treasurer has long believed in this picture of getting rid of negative gearing and capital gains tax. He told Sky News:

We think that any policy on housing affordability which doesn't make important and considered changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing has a hole in the middle of it.

That's the Treasurer. That was the Treasurer back in 2017. It didn't end there. A month after that he said:

Any housing policy that doesn't have changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax is just a shocker.

'Any housing policy that doesn't have changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax is just a shocker.' I'm very happy to repeat that. The Prime Minister doesn't like it when I repeat things! But I will repeat that, because that's a great quote. To give you another one, the Treasurer told the ABC:

If you want to deal with housing affordability, you need to start with negative gearing and capital gains.

This Treasurer has made his view clear. We know what his real plan is, and he's not alone.

I mentioned the member for Moreton, who normally comes along to MPI. It's sad that he's not here today. He's looking for his next role in life. But we know he's alongside the Treasurer in wanting to get rid of negative gearing and cut back concessions on capital gains tax on the family home. The member for Macnamara has also said he's open to changes, and we'll hear from others. They're all looking down. I'm sure amongst them are many others who agree with the Treasurer's view on this. Well, I'll tell you what we're not going to do—we're not going to whack a tax on the family home or make it harder for mum and dad investors to squirrel away their investments and rent out homes to young Australians who want to get ahead.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the parliament about the government's incredibly broad and ambitious housing agenda. It's the broadest and most ambitious housing agenda a Commonwealth government has had for some decades. And the reason that we are taking this problem so seriously is very simple: this problem is having profound consequences for our country and for literally millions of Australians today.

I want to talk to you about some of the people I've talked to in these early months in the portfolio and just express their deep emotion about how much this problem is affecting their lives. Speaker, a lot of those conversations, you wouldn't be surprised to know, have been with young people. I've talked to a lot of young renters around the country, and they've talked to me about just the desolate experience that they have when they're between homes, spending every Saturday morning—instead of being able to spend time with their friends and their family—in rental queues. Some of these rental queues around Melbourne will go for 40 or 50 people. People have to literally spend hours looking at a property that is dilapidated and that they don't even want to live in. At the end of that process, that doesn't mean the young person gets the rental. They've got to fight with the other people who are standing in that queue. We see a lot of illegal behaviour where people are being encouraged to bid against each other, effectively raising the rental price. Most of the young people in that queue miss out. They talk to me about the sense of dread that they feel standing in those queues, knowing they've wasted yet another half a day trying to get into a rental property that they don't want and, in the end, not even getting there.

I've talked to a lot of parents, too. I hear quite a bit from parents about this. I think something that's really changed about the housing debate in this country is that, for the first time, the older generation are thinking about this in the context of those younger people. I talk to parents who are desperately worried about their children, and I'm not talking about 25- or 26-year-old children; they're worried about their teenage children and what the housing market will look like for them when they get into that age group. I talk to a lot of young people who are still living at home with their parents. They're not particularly young people but those who are 28 and 29—even young people in their 30s who are still at home with their parents just so they can try to get that opportunity to scrimp and save for a modest house deposit.

I talk to a lot of renters who are living a life of intense instability. I rented when I was a young person; I'm sure you would have rented a bit in your youth as well, Speaker. My view is there comes a time when Australians are entitled to expect stability in their lives, and, really, that time is around when people look to start having a family. All of us have talked to constituents who are in their 30s, with young children who are in early years and in school, who are renting. This is exactly the sort of Australian family that in the 1980s would in all likelihood—almost certainly—have owned their own home. And yet, today, these people are locked out of the housing market. The impact this is having on their lives is absolutely profound. I've talked to mums who have children with disability, who have to pick those kids up and move them from one school to another because they don't have the stability and the housing that they need. All of us talk to constituents who are spending extensive amounts of time travelling—I'm talking about more than an hour a day and more than two hours a day in a car—when they could have been spending that precious time with their children and their family. All of this comes back to the problem that we're having with housing in our country

We've got a really clear plan here, and it's one that we thought about a lot in opposition and brought forward. From the experts I talk to, there's pretty unanimous agreement that the things that the Labor government is trying to do about this problem are the right things—things that, frankly, could have been done a long time ago. We're having some issues though—you might have noticed, Speaker—in progressing a couple of areas of reform, and that is because we face an incredible intransigence in this parliament. We don't just have a broken housing market in this country; we have broken housing politics. What I mean by that is we've got a lot of parliamentarians who come in here, say all the right things, and then, when it's time to take action and make real progress for real people, they instead turn their back on Australians and choose politics over progress.

We see that extensively from those who sit opposite me, and it's not much of a surprise really because housing has just never been a priority for the coalition. When I talk to Australians about what they feel produced the housing crisis that we're dealing with right now, they often point to what was effectively 10 years of inaction from those opposite. I'll remind you of a couple of things that really speak to this. We had a coalition government for almost a decade in this country, and for five of those years there was actually no Commonwealth housing minister. They're trying to get credibility in this debate. For most of the time they were in government, there was no Commonwealth housing minister. I try to be polite and respectful in this parliament, but there are a few things I could say about how the people they choose to lead this debate reflect the importance that they place on it, and I think we saw that with the choice of the housing minister and the current shadow housing minister.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We reduced homelessness.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We were pretty successful by comparison.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Everyone who is watching this debate can see that the Commonwealth alone can't fix this problem.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Homelessness was lower under us. It's through the roof under your mob.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We saw that state and territory housing ministers were not brought together—not at all. There was not a single conversation with state and territory housing ministers and the Commonwealth for the last five years that the coalition were in government.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's a lie!

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

 So I don't find surprising at all this extensive—

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

Honourable members.

Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Shut up!

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and rude interruption from those opposite.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tell the truth!

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

Honourable members!

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, could you call them to order? I'd be appreciative of that.

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

I'm more than happy to make a call, but I'm asking you to give me the opportunity. Honourable members, you'll have your opportunity, and I'll make sure, when you're making your contribution, that the same respect is shown to you from the other side.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you so much, Deputy Speaker. So it is a real shame that we see a government that's got a plan here and those opposite, after their decade of complete inaction on this problem, will not let us make progress on some key parts of it.

Unfortunately, we do see a pretty similar attitude from the Greens, who are important for us trying to get our housing agenda through the Senate. We're seeing it on the Help to Buy legislation, which is before the parliament at the moment. I'll be reintroducing that bill into the House very shortly, and I'm really hopeful that the Greens are able to take a beat and do the right thing and support the people that they say they care about. The Help to Buy legislation will come before the parliament again. It is about making sure that 40,000 childcare workers and aged care workers and early years teachers have the opportunity to own their own home. It's based on a pretty simple belief that ordinary people in our country should have the ability to access home ownership. Here we have the chance for the parliament to support 40,000 of those people into home ownership. Instead of allowing us to make progress on this matter, the Greens political party continue to play politics.

I've spent a little bit of time in the last couple of weeks visiting states where shared-equity schemes—as the Help to Buy legislation is—are on foot at the moment and speaking to young people who have been able to use those schemes to get into home ownership. I met a wonderful young man, Yianni, last week in Adelaide. He's 26 years old. He's a physio at the local Defence base. He literally gets out of bed every morning and goes to a Defence base and assists veterans in trying to regain mobility after they've had injuries. He's spent his whole life so far living with his parents, and he talked to me about this opportunity of getting a shared-equity scheme—of starting out thinking that he had no chance of getting home ownership, then learning about a shared-equity scheme, putting aside that little bit of money that he could and then the incredible feeling that he had of actually getting that chance to own his first home. He said to me, ‘Any kind of scheme that helps people get into the housing market in this way is amazing,’ and he just talked to me about the experience he has now of having his own space. For him, it was about the experience of becoming an adult and having housing as a part of that.

I also met with Emma in Melbourne last week, who is a researcher and who was able to buy her first property thanks to the Victorian shared-equity scheme. She talked to me about the experience she had, quite similarly to Yianni, where she had basically given up on home ownership—this amazing young person in Melbourne. She just talked to me about the genuine elation she felt and how she walked around the house after she got home ownership for the first time and thought to herself, ‘I can't believe this is mine and that I don't have to ask permission to paint the walls, that I don't have to worry about hanging a picture and that my dog can have a place they get to know where they can feel safe and comfortable.’ These are the things that home ownership means, and we can make 40,000 Emmas and Yiannis if we work together as a parliament to address this critical issue.

Help to Buy is, of course, only one part of the government's agenda. We are working very hard with the states to build more homes in our country. We are working with the states to improve renters’ rights, and we've helped 120,000 people into home ownership through the home guarantee scheme so far. We've got a rich and broad housing agenda, and it's been a real pleasure to speak to the parliament about some of those initiatives.

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

I thank the honourable member for her contribution, and before I give the call to the most honourable member for Deakin, I would just acknowledge that the same courtesy will be given to the opposition that was extended—

Honourable members interjecting—

Once I got into the chair? I would suggest that—

Honourable members interjecting—

I give the call to the most honourable member for Deakin.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The housing minister studiously avoided the topic of this MPI. One wonders why she even bothered turning up, because the MPI refers to the threat to the tax treatment of negative gearing. We know the housing minister wants to avoid any difficult debates and discussions, because the cupboard is threadbare here on the government’s side with respect to any coherent housing policy or anything that would seek to help either first homebuyers or renters.

This is about Labor's agenda to tax housing even more, and every time the Labor Party talk about taxing housing more by abolishing negative gearing and doubling capital gains tax, what they're essentially saying to the Australian people is, ‘Housing needs to be taxed more.' The logic of their argument is that if you tax it more, it will somehow be cheaper for people who are either buying or renting. Now that would be the first time in the history of tax policy that taxing something more leads to a cheaper price. In fact, all you need to do is ask the members of the government to reflect on excise policy in this country. Successive governments have made the decision, for health reasons, to decrease cigarette and tobacco consumption in this country. So what have they done? Successive governments have increased the tax on cigarettes, why? Because they want people to consume less of them.

Quite simply, if you tax housing more, fewer homes will be built. Higher taxes equals fewer homes. So every time the Labor Party talk about abolishing negative gearing for mums and dads and doubling capital gains tax just on housing—not abolishing the capital gains tax discount on other things but just abolishing it on housing—what they are saying is, ‘We want to tax housing more.’ We know from modelling undertaken by Deloitte Access Economics, through the Property Council, that that is the exact consequence of abolishing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount on housing. Higher taxes and fewer homes equals higher rents.

It takes some sort of genius to come up with a policy that's been rejected by the Australian people time and time again. In fact, it was even rejected by a former Labor government who tried this and, when it disastrously failed, backflipped and reinstated these tax settings. It takes a special sort of genius to go down this path again. This is a policy that will simultaneously tax mum-and-dad investors more, increase the rent for Australians who are already suffering crippling rent increases and through lower housing stock make it even more difficult to buy a home.

The shadow Treasurer, when he made his remarks in relation to this, highlighted the dichotomy here. On one hand, the Labor government want to abolish negative gearing and slash the capital gains tax discount for Australian mum-and-dad investors, therefore increasing the housing taxes for them. But simultaneously they want to reduce the amount of taxes that large investment funds pay, including many foreign investment funds, like Vanguard, Blackstone—big US funds. The question here is who owns Australia's rental stock? A third of Australians, give or take, rent a home. Someone's got to own those homes. There are millions of homes. Someone's got to own them. At the moment, mum-and-dad investors own those homes. Australian mums and dads own overwhelmingly one property that they invest in for their future and the future of their children. Labor want to tax them out of existence so those homes are not owned by those mum-and-dad investors anymore. Instead the Labor government want them to be owned by large foreign funds who own tens of thousands of those properties to rent out to Australians.

Lower taxes for the foreign corporates and higher taxes for the mum-and-dad investors would be a disaster for this country and is not a vision that we share. This government is bereft of ideas. Sadly the housing minister, who was demoted from her former role, is a big part of the problem we are facing here because, on her watch, she ramped up migration to more than a million people in two years when we're building fewer homes, and that's why rents are rising. Shame on Labor.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm happy to speak on this MPI to do with housing. I think it sets out nicely the differences between the coalition and the government. We had the member for Hume spend 10 minutes talking about manufactured fear. Then we had the member for Deakin spend five minutes of manufactured outrage about something. And we had the housing minister, who offered practical solutions and hope, because we are the party of hope. I'm delivering this address aimed squarely at my 19-year-old son because I fear for him and his generation in terms of what chance they will have. Thankfully, the housing minister laid out plenty of practical solutions and a clear plan. I note that we don't have anyone from the Greens political party here for a debate about housing. I guess that is that dangerous interplay that we've got.

Whilst we're an old party, we're all about new ideas. We're a very old party. Those opposite saw Menzies investing millions of dollars in social housing. That's what Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party, did. He invested a lot of money in public housing. Now they have basically deserted that. As I said, we're an old party, and we're called the old party by the Greens as if that's a slur. The Greens have been around for about 50 years, but they're still pretending that they're the young party. Really it's mutton dressed as tofu, isn't it? They are an old party, and they have joined with the Liberal Party and the National Party. It's incredible. I think the Prime Minister touched on this. If the leader of the Liberal Party and the leader of the National Party stop housing any longer, they'll have to have a double-barrelled surname. They really will. What would it be? Would it be Proud-Dutton? No, that doesn't work. Or would it be Little-Dutton? They'll have to have some combination if they're going to keep blocking housing like the Greens do. That's what they'll have to do. They'll need to get a double-barrelled name of some sort.

We are providing national leadership when it comes to housing and more importantly $32 billion. We're training more tradies so that the Australians of tomorrow can build those houses. We've also had to bring in a few skilled tradespeople, as those opposite would know if they actually spoke to people in the building sector. They get scared by the idea that they might run into someone from the CFMEU. I'll give you a clue: the housing sector is not a heavily union regulated business. Go and talk to the people in your suburbs. Do you know what their No. 1 concern is? Getting skilled people to work on their building sites. That's why investing in training is a great thing—the fee-free TAFE and all of those things. We're delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade—$6.2 billion in direct budget investment. We are committed, in a fair dinkum way, to building 1.2 million homes.

The opposition and the Greens—the missing sector of the parliament—have combined in this unholy alliance to block a sensible policy that will deliver homes for 40,000 people. You might say, 'Well, that's not a lot, in terms of percentages,' but, I'll tell you what, that will make a difference. As we heard from the Minister for Housing, through the individual story she related, it does make a difference. It gives people a roof over their heads. It gives security, and so many other benefits come from having secure housing. We know that it's difficult. I've been an MP for 17 years and I have never seen as many homeless people as I'm seeing now. Before I was elected, I was on the board of Kyabra Community Organisation, which actually builds housing—yes, Greens, there are people that build housing. In fact, if people build more houses, we'll have more houses. The Greens keep saying, 'You're on the side of developers.' Well, people like Kyabra and the Brotherhood of St Laurence build houses.

I know the leader of the Greens combated a housing development built by those evil developers the Brotherhood of St Laurence. We need people, like the Brisbane Housing Company, to build more housing. That's what we need, and this policy will give 40,000 eligible Australians a chance to buy a home, with either 40 per cent of the purchase price for new homes or 30 per cent for existing homes. It's in Greens electorates, and it's also in coalition electorates around the nation. Get on board.

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remember buying my first home of my own. It was here in Canberra, in the 1980s. It was a little one-bedroom 1960s bed brick unit, and it was mine. I could play my choice of music. I didn't have to accommodate flatmates. Up until then I'd shared houses. I could paint it if I wanted to. I could change the blinds. There was just that sense of being able to control the space that you're in. It was tiny. It was a foot in the door. But when I sold it a few years later it didn't buy me a house or even a flat; it bought me a block of land, and I then got another mortgage and built a house in the Blue Mountains, which is the block that I'm on to this day. That's a lot of years ago.

I remember, on both those occasions, the sense of security it gave me—a sense of place, of having somewhere that was mine, no matter what else was happening, including in the press gallery in Old Parliament House. No matter what was happening, I had a place to retreat to. And I want more people to feel that, to have that sense of their own place, because I think secure housing—knowing the place you're going to sleep in not just tonight but every night for as long as you choose for that to be your home—all comes down to your control over that space. I think having that sense of security also allows you to focus on education or career, your physical or mental health, your family. That is really special, but it is out of reach for way too many people right now.

Previous speakers have talked about their fears for their children. I'm the bottom of the baby boomers, and my friends and I fear for our own children and our grandchildren. We fear for nieces and nephews and their friends, who don't have the same belief about a home, because of the neglect that this sector has faced for so many years. They don't have that sense of trust that this will one day be theirs. We have to change that, and we're very focused on changing it, and the only way we're going to change it is with more supply. For a start, we need supply that gives people a place to rent while they're saving to buy their own home. But, more than anything, we need new places to expand the options for people. Without supply we're just going to get stuck in this rut with prices of existing properties spiralling. It's really clear to us that that has to be the focus, not tax changes that are not even our policy, which is what the opposition wants to talk about—the place where there has been a vacuum of housing policy the entire time I've been in this parliament. For more than eight years there has been nothing from those opposite to provide any tangible improvement in housing supply. But that's what we are focused on.

The cost of housing is one of the biggest hip-pocket hits that people are feeling right now, whether it's through their mortgage or through their rent. I want to put something on the record. There's a lot of talk about who did it tougher. Was it the people back in the nineties paying 17 per cent interest rates? I was one of those. But there's no doubt in my mind that young people now are facing a much tougher barrier to entry into housing. We were paying maybe 17 or 17½ per cent. It was off a lower base. Yes, our incomes were lower, but our cost of living was also lower because we just didn't have the essentials that you have to have today. That is why housing speaks to the true cost-of-living crisis that people are facing.

We're helping in three ways. One is that our housing policy and our cost-of-living policy are all about helping to reduce the costs and helping to stop the increase from continuing on the terrible trajectory that it is on. That's the second challenge: fighting inflation. It is half what it was when we came to government. These are the challenges. And the third one is supply.

Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Supply, supply, supply. That is the answer to the pressures facing Australia's housing sector. Increasing supply is what the Labor government has been seeking to do since our election in 2022. It's the policy we took to the election: more homes to buy, more homes to rent, more homes period. That's the answer to ensuring more Australians get a roof over their heads and enjoy the security that the member for Macquarie alluded to. But standing in the way is Australia's new coalition of protest and petty grievance. The Liberals and the Greens are chained together to the excavator on home sites across the country, stopping tradies from getting on with the job. It's not Bob the Builder; it's 'Pete the protester'.

This MPI, from the member for Hume, is on negative gearing, which shouldn't surprise us. The shadow Treasurer has brought on a matter of public importance about a matter that is not government policy. It's a Seinfeld debate—a debate about a policy that doesn't exist, except in the cavernous space of the member for Hume's head. It's easier for him, I suppose, than an MPI on the government's actual economic record of more jobs, higher wages, bigger tax cuts, lower inflation and two big Labor budget surpluses. The fact is this Labor government is fixing the mess the Liberals left behind over their decade of neglect. Labor has done more for housing in three years than the Liberals did in 10. If you want to look at the record of Liberals in government, look no further than the bin fire in my home state. After a decade of state Liberal government, Tasmania has 4,700 people on the emergency housing waiting list. It has doubled since the Liberals were elected in 2014. The average wait time for placement is 94 weeks, which is four times longer than in 2014. As for affordability, New South Wales remains the most unaffordable, but a close second is Tassie. That's the legacy of a decade of failed Liberal government in Tasmania and nationally.

Compare that to the progress that's been made after just three years of federal Labor government. Our $32 billion Homes for Australia plan unlocks all parts of the housing ecosystem to build more homes, providing leadership, funding and incentives to state governments to get homes more quickly, training more tradies, funding more apprenticeships and growing the workforce, including through fee-free TAFE, which those opposite opposed. We're delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to help reduce homelessness. We're improving affordability, with our $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, our $3 billion social housing accelerator payment and the largest increase to Commonwealth rental assistance in 30 years.

One part of our comprehensive housing plan is the Help to Buy bill being blocked and delayed by the Liberals and Greens in the Senate. Help to Buy will support up to 40,000 eligible Australians, many of them young Australians, to purchase a home. It will do this by the government taking on some of the equity in the property, significantly bringing down the cost of servicing the loan. We know it will work because various states, including Tasmania and Western Australia, already have similar shared-equity schemes in place. A shared-equity scheme even operates under the state Liberal government of Tasmania, and shared-equity schemes are part of Greens policy, but both the Liberals and the Greens in this place are chained together in opposition to shared equity. The naked political pointscoring of this coalition of chaos is stopping 40,000 Australians a year from getting the opportunity to get their foot on the first rung of the homeownership ladder.

The shadow Treasurer has brought on a debate about taxation policy. What he should be talking about is the Labor government's taxation policy. I'm very proud of the changes we made to the Liberal Party's stage 3, which delivered a tax cut for every Australian worker and bigger tax cuts for most. Importantly, they also delivered a tax cut to workers earning under $40,000 a year, who would have received nothing under those opposite. In my home state of Tasmania, 90 per cent of workers—nine in 10—are better off under the Labor government's taxation policy changes. That's what this debate should be about, not the fantasy of changes to negative gearing, which is not government policy.

Simon Kennedy (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Lyons is correct: supply, supply, supply—that is the answer. Unfortunately for him, the Labor government isn't doing much about that. As of today, the Housing Australia Future Fund is yet to pay out a single cent or build a single home. This signature policy is yet to deliver anything on supply. Yes, the member for Lyons and the Minister for Housing, Clare O'Neil, believe that the fundamental reason behind Australia's house price growth is supply not keeping up with demand, and they are right. But, unfortunately for us and, more importantly, unfortunately for Australians all around the country, they are not doing anything about it. There is still no detail on where these houses will be located, when they will be built or who will build them.

Unfortunately, there are real people suffering from these policies. I spoke to a community member recently: a single mum, escaping domestic violence, who had been living in a three-bedroom apartment in Miranda. The apartment was being sold, so she was being forced to move out. She could not find a place, despite going for rental after rental. When she came to my office she was going to be homeless in 10 days time. I called the real estate agent, thinking that there must be some problem with her application—she mustn't have enough money or a good job. They informed me it wasn't the application; it was just that there were 40 people going for each three-bedroom apartment in Miranda. While those opposite have identified a problem of supply, they have been unable and unwilling to fix it, and unfortunately there are people who are paying the price, like this constituent of mine who is facing homelessness with her two children.

Now we hear about secret plans to look at negative gearing. The problem is: if they believe it's supply, negative gearing doesn't help with supply. Independent analysis by Master Builders Australia suggests that there's a shortfall of 166,000 properties against the Labor government's 1.2 million target. A separate model put forward by the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council says Labor will fall at least 300,000 homes short of their aim. The problem is that any tinkering to negative gearing will make this much worse. Modelling by Cadence Economics reveals that Labor's negative-gearing tax and any changes to that would lead to Australia ending up with 42,000 fewer dwellings, 32,000 fewer full-time jobs and up to $11.8 billion less building activity. The Property Council commissioned a report from Deloitte that showed that changes to negative gearing would cause a 4.1 per cent hit to the dwindling pipeline for new homes. Those changes would be a $1.5 billion hit to our already languishing GDP and would cost Australia over 7,800 jobs.

A more recent study, from the University of Melbourne, found that any changes to negative gearing would see supply reduced by 1.8 per cent. More research conducted by the University of Melbourne found that rent would increase by 3.6 per cent and the welfare budget by 1.7 per cent if negative gearing were removed. So, whether they're rumours that are being pushed out by the Labor Party to check this policy out, what we do know is that changes would hit Australians harder, when they are already struggling with the cost of living.

Given these facts, I imagine the minister, who's a good person, would be troubled by these reports that the Treasurer and his department could be secretly modelling changes. Centre for Independent Studies economist Peter Tulip says getting rid of these tax deductions would have very little effect on housing affordability. He argues instead that, actually, supply reforms and zoning reforms would have up to a 30 to 50 per cent effect on house prices. The Labor government should be focused on housing supply, not imposing a higher tax burden on Australia.

There's record migration under this government, with 547,000 immigrants last year and only 164,000 new homes added. This year looks to be on track for the same sorts of numbers. When we have this huge imbalance between demand and supply, we need to solely focus on increasing supply so that people like my constituent, a single mother, can find housing, doesn't have to face homelessness and doesn't have the stress of wondering whether she and her two daughters are going to be sleeping on the street. We need more housing supply desperately.

Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a remarkable matter of importance presented to the House today by the member for Hume. I say 'remarkable' because those opposite are actively blocking housing supply and cost-of-living relief in this country when it is needed most, as we're seeing right now in their opposition to Help to Buy and as we saw in their heel-dragging over Labor's tax cuts for all Australians, and then they stand up in this place not to help Australian families doing it tough, not to bring any actual solutions to the table, but instead to weaponise people doing their best to deal with the cost of living. Like a tool in the shed, the coalition will only bring up housing when it's politically useful to them, not to help everyday Australians.

In my electorate of Spence this is especially disappointing because as the local member I know that my community is one of the hardest hit by this cost-of-living crisis. I know it not just from the stats but firsthand, on the ground. There are families in tough circumstances, living week to week, watching their costs going up, doing all they can to pay their bills and put food on the table, across Elizabeth, Salisbury and Gawler. I see it every single day in this job, and every single action that I take in this job is to help them. That is to help bring their rents down and make houses more affordable. That's to help get their income up and get their wages where they need to be for them to live and thrive well into the future. I'm proud to be part of an Albanese Labor government that feels exactly the same as me. I'm even prouder to hold the Liberals to account when they do their best to block that help.

Across the long nine years on their watch, the previous Liberal government never helped those families in Davoren Park, Munno Para and Craigmore as the housing crisis in this nation got worse and worse. Those families were tightening their belts more and more as their rents went up exponentially, whilst those opposite sat on their hands and did nothing. They not only continue to do so now; their insistence on sheer inaction is only making this crisis worse. It's part of a strategy to promote fear and division to help themselves instead of actually helping people, as this MPI makes clear.

But Australians in my community and across the country see through it. They know that this government has a clear policy on housing, and it does not include a change to negative gearing. That policy is to build, build, build. The Liberals don't like it, because their policy is to block, block, block. Regardless, this Labor government has set a target to build 1.2 million homes in this country by the end of the decade. That's because, unlike those opposite, we are tackling the housing crisis. A part of that is the federal government's work with our state counterparts nationwide to ensure these houses are constructed quickly.

I watched this happen in real time just last week in Virginia, alongside the Minister for Housing in this place and the minister for housing in SA, Nick Champion. As we speak, more than 3,000 metres of new trunk water main are being laid underneath Angle Vale Road in my electorate. This project alone will support up to 40,000 new dwellings in the north, delivered in a collaboration between this federal Labor government and South Australia's Malinauskas Labor government. That is government addressing the housing crisis, government helping everyday Australians who are doing it tough. It is not launching scare campaigns on negative gearing or blocking cost-of-living assistance to score points; it is taking real action for real Australians. The member for Hume and his Liberal colleagues should take note.

This Labor government isn't stopping there, either. We're training more tradies, to grow the workforce and help build those unlocked houses. We're delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to directly make houses more affordable where they are needed most. That's all part of our plan, in creating supply to meet demand. But we want to do more. With our Help to Buy Bill we want to support 40,000 Australians to purchase their own home. We want to give tens of thousands of families in this country the means to break into the housing market. But, just like with the tax cuts and so many other policies to directly improve the circumstances of everyday Australians, the Liberals say no. They would prefer to block this opportunity to help 40,000 Australians own a home. Those actions say more than this offensive waste of an MPI discussion ever could.