Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Those are highly commendable statements. We are all for a culture of savings right across the board. But I would urge second thoughts, I suppose, in that we are about to pass a bill which will allow potentially very wealthy people who do not need assistance to open these first home saver accounts. I really do not understand why, when there is $1 billion on the table, or somewhat more than $1 billion, we could not check back on people’s incomes a year or two years afterwards. It is not something that would need to be regulated moment to moment as people’s incomes or circumstances changed, but with such a large appropriation on the table I cannot see why it would be impossible or beyond our means to test their income a year or two years after the first home saver accounts were opened.

I also do not think that people who opened these accounts and who found their circumstances were better some way down the track would resent the amount of support being withdrawn. When we have 100,000 Australians in various categories of homelessness I do not think that it would be in the Australian character to begrudge giving back a certain amount of that money or not drawing as heavily on Commonwealth funds. This is more than half of the new Commonwealth spending on housing affordability, and we think it is completely out of balance that so much is going to assist people to get into their first homes, which obviously we support, when the rest of that funding is really being squeezed. This is one very simple measure that we could adopt, and I simply do not understand why the compliance burden would need to be so high. So I commend this amendment to the Senate.