Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I speak on the bill before us, which is a taxation laws amendment bill relating to housing tax integrity. As has already been indicated, the Greens will be supporting this bill. But I want to take the opportunity to reflect further, for the information of the Senate and in particular on behalf of the people of Queensland, on some of the underlying issues that this bill, in only a very small part, seeks to address. I would remind the Senate that this legislation seeks to make a very small move to deal with one aspect of the tax laws relating to negatively geared property. It also implements a vacancy tax on properties owned by foreign investors. From the Greens' point of view, and from my point of view in Queensland, even a minor tightening up of negative gearing is a good thing. But this is very much a matter of tinkering at the edges of a massive problem that has been highlighted over and over again.

Not surprisingly, as somebody who came back into this chamber yesterday after a nearly 10-year break, I have had cause to reflect on some of the things that have changed and some of the things that seem very much the same. It was indeed over 10 years ago in this place—28 March 2007, to be precise—that I moved as a matter of urgency in this chamber the need to develop an affordable housing strategy, because of the massive crisis in housing affordability for people seeking to buy a home and people renting their own home. That was a crisis 10 years ago. It's worth noting that the issue for that matter of urgency was urgent 10 years ago, but other parties in the Senate voted against that proposal to develop an affordable housing strategy. If it was urgent 10 years ago, as it undoubtedly was, it is twice as urgent now, but the lack of action has been astonishing at both federal and state level.

The area of negative gearing in particular is one that has been flagged time and time again, so much so that the Hawke government in its very early days, back in the 1980s, recognised this and abolished it before caving in to the political power—the donations and the money—of the developer lobby. It passed this chamber at the time with the support of the Australian Democrats, but was then reversed by decision of the Labor government, who didn't have the courage to follow through on it. Ever since that time, that running sore has caused continuing, growing failure in the housing market in this country, because, under the Labor Party and the Liberal and National parties at state and federal level, housing policy has in effect been privatised. Perhaps alongside access to food, access to safe, secure, affordable stable housing has to be one of the most basic human rights every Australian could have, yet that has basically been contracted out to the market—a perfect case of profits being put before people.

One of the very last things I was part of when I was in this chamber last time around, in 2008, was a select committee inquiry set up by this Senate into affordable housing. It was chaired by Senator Marise Payne, who I'm pleased to see is still in this chamber in a more senior role with the current government, and produced a series of recommendations. My current colleague Senator Rachel Siewert was also part of that inquiry. That inquiry recommended that there needed to be a significant, proper review of the tax treatment of negative gearing, of the capital gains tax discount for people who are property investors and of capital gains tax exemptions for residential property, yet 10 years later we've had no action at federal level in regard to these taxation measures until this very small action just now.

At state government level in a number of states, under both Liberal and Labor governments, the massive impact of property developer donations and the property developer industry more broadly is notorious, so much so that the one area where we've had advancement in political donation reform has been the banning of political donations from property developers in New South Wales, and in my own state of Queensland just in the last month or so as a result of yet another scandal at local government level and of an inquiry into that by the Crime and Corruption Commission, which recommended banning donations from property developers to political parties at local government level. I would acknowledge that the state Labor government accepted that recommendation and sought to expand it to political parties at state level, not just for local government, but it then decided to call an early election before legislating to bring the ban into place.

This legislation—a minor incremental tightening of what let's not forget is a massive tax break for property investors in the area of negative gearing—is a small, welcome development. Negative gearing is clearly massively regressive. It costs tens of billions of dollars of foregone revenue that could otherwise be invested directly into affordable housing. This is the approach that the Greens propose, and it is the approach the Queensland Greens have explicitly proposed in this coming state election—that is, to put a massive direct investment of funds into building affordable housing for the public, for public and community housing, straight away. The money can be raised, it can be provided, particularly if you have state and federal governments working together.

Similarly, the vacancy tax that's proposed here on properties owned by foreign investors—it's a step forward of sorts. Certainly a vacancy tax is a great idea, but it should apply to all investor-owned properties, not just those from abroad. In effect, we've got this government trying to use this measure to blame somebody else again. They're trying to blame overseas investors for their own failures in housing. My own state of Queensland is facing a housing crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders are homeless, are on the social housing waiting list, are facing severe mortgage stress or are completely locked out of the housing market altogether. People are having to pay significant rents under a tenancy law regime where they do not have security over their own home and can be forced to move at quite short notice, with no control over the place they call home. Meanwhile, the wealthy few are allowed to have their houses remain vacant. We have a situation where there are more vacant houses today in my own city of Brisbane than there are homeless people across the entire state of Queensland. Those homeless people don't really care if that vacant house is owned by a property investor who lives overseas or a property investor who lives next door. They care that the house is vacant at a time when we have 20,000 Queenslanders who are homeless and 29,000 people on the social housing waiting list.

Tightening up negative gearing, slightly, and introducing a constricted vacancy tax are good things as far as they go, but with this bill we see the government tinkering around the edges rather than taking meaningful action that will get to the systemic problems that have been embedded and allowed to grow worse and worse with the massive market failure in this most fundamental area of social policy. Tonight there will be tens of thousands of Queenslanders sleeping rough, camping in their cars, couch surfing—and they all deserve better. They deserve a government, they deserve politicians and they deserve political parties that are committed to putting people before profit.

To this end, the Queensland Greens have outlined a bold vision for the state election that's happening the weekend after this—voting is already happening in that election—to ensure every Queenslander has a home and that meaningfully addresses the failures of the housing market, which has failed for everybody except for property developers and investors. We need to make affordable housing and the provision of housing for everybody the Medicare of the 21st century. In the same way that we recognise we need to have governments and policies and legislation that ensures that all Queenslanders, all Australians, can access education, can access health care, we recognise they also should be able to access an affordable, safe, secure home. The Queensland Greens would see the establishment of a new Queensland housing trust dedicated to this goal. Within the first 10 years, that trust would invest $60 billion to finance the construction of 200,000 affordable homes and, based on the jobs figures of the Queensland Housing Strategy, would produce more than 16,000 jobs at the same time as producing affordable housing for so many Queenslanders to move into—those 29,000 people who are currently on the waiting list, many of them who have been on that list for years.

The Greens' Queensland housing trust would be supplemented with revenue from our proposed increases to mining royalties under our fair share plan and through the introduction of a tax on all deliberately vacant properties, not just on those who have investors from abroad. This would combine to provide a $10 billion boost during the first 10 years of construction. The Greens are proposing investment in beautiful, sustainable homes where people can live with dignity. I saw in the newspaper in my hometown of Brisbane, in The Sunday Mail, that apparently this was a source of horror: apparently providing beautiful, well-planned, affordable housing for everybody in Queensland was some East German Cold War nightmare. It might have something to do with the fact that it's not just the two political parties of the establishment who rely so much on the real estate industry and property developers; perhaps the corporate media's desperate reliance on money and advertising from the property industry and from the real estate industry might also be a reason they're so keen to be a mouthpiece for the Property Council.

The Greens are interested in being a voice for everyday Queenslanders, particularly those Queenslanders who are waiting for safe, secure and affordable housing, those who are having to choose between being able to pay the rent or put food on the table, and those who aren't sure whether they're going to be evicted from their home at the end of the year or whether they have long-term security of tenure in their homes. That is why the Greens have also proposed significant reforms to the tenancy laws in my home state of Queensland: to provide that security of tenure.

It takes me back to those times 10 years ago when I was in this chamber repeatedly asking the government of the day, and Senator Minchin who was the Leader of the Government in the Senate at the time—I think he was the Minister for Finance—about this issue of affordable housing. I asked what the federal government was going to do about it. Timeand time again his only answer—his answer No. 1—was to blame the states. That's a pretty standard approach for federal governments on most things. His second one was: 'Well, we keep interest rates low. That's the way you deliver affordable housing.' That has been shown to be economically illiterate. We have recently had the lowest interest rates in Australia year after year. It used to be a stick that the Liberal government used to beat the Labor Party and others over—that somehow there would always be lower interest rates under a Liberal government, as though this would deliver affordable housing. We've now had lower interest rates again for years and the housing affordability crisis is worse than ever.

The so-called economic logic behind the so-called good economic managers of the coalition government is once again shown to be a complete facade and as hollow as their words. It also showed a total lack of concern, or even probably awareness, of the huge number of Australians—the huge number of Queenslanders—who rent their own home. I am one of those people. Certainly, it's not something that anybody should feel the need to try and hide. It is something that many, many people do for all sorts of reasons, but it is a reality of the situation that our laws in all states to varying degrees are very much biased towards the property owner and against the private tenant. That is another reason why the Greens, both in this chamber at the federal level and in state parliaments around the country, have pushed for the strengthening of the rights of tenants under tenancy law. It's an example of why it is so important to have Greens in state parliaments: to be able to push the envelope, and to be able to push the other parties and whoever's in government at the time to go further and act to address the problems of the communities that elect us here.

We've just heard a number of wonderful, heartwarming speeches about Senator Lambie. It's a matter of some disappointment to me that, just as I've got here—unfortunately, at least for the moment—she's gone. One of the key themes of what people said about Senator Lambie was that, as just one person here, through her commitment to push on an issue strongly and consistently and with integrity, passion and belief she was able to get shift across pretty much the entire political spectrum. That is a classic example of how electing even just one Green into the Queensland parliament would massively shift the dynamic in that parliament. That would help to get these issues on the agenda, to get advances in tenancy law reform and to get governments to go back to having a direct responsibility for investing in providing affordable housing for the entire community, rather than, in effect, privatising it and handing it to the market, in an area where the market has failed.

Part of the reason the market has failed is not just that the rules have been rorted to benefit the property developers and the property industry, who provide so many big donations to the coffers of the two parties of the political establishment, but also that the market itself has been savagely distorted over many years by these federal tax measures. It's been distorted for decades because of negative gearing, and then that distortion got turbocharged at the end of last century by the capital gains tax discount—which, unfortunately, the Labor Party supported at the time to enable it to come into being, because it would not have got through this chamber without the support of the then Labor opposition. Those two tax measures, along with the capital gains tax exemption for residential property, have combined to create a massive market distortion, alongside a set of rules that are already basically biased towards the investor and towards the well-off.

It is time—in fact, it is well past time—that we had political parties and political representatives who will once again put forward credible, costed policies that will get quick action to address the housing affordability crisis. As I said at the start, it's a crisis that's been in place for a long period of time, and it's simply got worse and worse and worse.

The measures in this bill, whilst welcome, really do not go anywhere near the heart of the problem, even in regard to the distortion in our tax regime. We certainly are not seeing from any other political party at state level the sort of policy that the Greens are putting forward: a significant, major, direct, immediate investment in building housing infrastructure for the community, for the public, to address those massive housing waiting lists. It would get people off the streets, end homelessness and produce significant numbers of jobs as well as providing infrastructure for everybody. That is the vision the Greens have for the future. It's the vision the Greens are putting forward to the Queensland election. If we can get good legislative change at federal level alongside it, we really can make the housing affordability crisis a thing of the past.