Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not think the comments that he made this morning would indicate that he understands how hard young people who do not have the benefit of parents in a position to financially support their entry into the housing market are doing it at the moment. We got a bit of an insight into it in Four Corners on Monday night, when we saw them showcase the individual stories of young people with quite significant amounts of money trying to compete in the Australian housing market as it is structured now and not being able to. It was unbelievable that a young woman who has saved $150,000 has spent nearly two years attending auctions around her city, trying to break in and getting outbid every single time—including in the episode we saw, within approximately one minute of the bidding commencing.

Perhaps if this were an isolated incident, perhaps if it were just a dismissive reference to housing affordability—but you have to see the Prime Minister's comments in the context of a budget that did absolutely nothing to address housing affordability. That budget was handed down last night. I am not even sure that it mentions the words 'housing affordability'. There was not one initiative in it that sought to rebalance the playing field and enable first-home buyers to compete in a level way with investors. There was no certainty for the housing agreements with the states. There was no certainty for the homelessness sector. More than 100,000 people sleep homeless every night in this country. The services that support them got no recognition in the budget last night. I see that a number of housing groups are coming out today bemoaning the lack of attention to housing affordability. So we have to see the Prime Minister's comments dismissing housing affordability as an issue, telling people that their parents should be buying them a house, in that context.

We should also see them in the context of what we saw last week, when the Prime Minister dismissed as 'beside the point'—I think those were the words used—the fact that high-income earners get the vast majority of the capital gains concessions because, as he explained for all of us, they tend to own more property. It was beside the point that they took the vast amount—I think the top 10 per cent of income earners take 70 per cent—of the capital gains tax concession as it stood in the budget.

Those are the contexts that you have to see these comments in. They are not isolated. They symbolise the leader of this country, the Prime Minister, who is heading into an election where housing affordability is a genuine issue that deserves attention from policymakers. There have been three years of no housing policy. There is no housing policy from this government. There is no housing affordability strategy. There have been three ministers responsible, and we have a Prime Minister who—and we can only judge him on the words he uses and the comments he makes—dismisses housing affordability as a bit of a joke or as something that you can pass off onto other people to pay for, for parents to pay for their kids to enter the housing market.

Those are the contexts that we see those comments in. They cannot be dismissed. They deserve the proper attention from a government that cares about the issue of housing affordability, because I know from the people who talk to me that there are millions of people who either think they will never buy a house or have certainly given up on the dream for the short term.