Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Schedule 2 of the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021 amends the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation Act to include an additional objective of assisting earlier access to the housing market by eligible single parents with dependants. Of course, it is very difficult to oppose that objective, and the Greens don't oppose it; we support schedule 2 of the bill. But I will place firmly on the record what we don't support—that is, the way the government intends to give effect to schedule 2.

As outlined in the budget, the government plans to establish the so-called Family Home Guarantee by allowing up to 10,000 single parents to buy a home with as little as a two per cent deposit. This budget measure tells you everything you need to know about this government's approach to housing—it is cooked. As I said earlier today, Australia's housing market is cooked. Rather than a home being regarded as a human right that everyone should have secure access to, housing in Australia has been turned into a game of speculation. How this has come about is very clear. Negative gearing and the capital gains tax concession are public subsidies for property investors that create an uneven playing field that means that there are a lot more people who want to buy a house than there are people who actually need a house to live in. Those who don't want to live in the house that they're buying have more money than those who do want to live in the house that they want to buy, thanks to this public subsidy. It's cooking the housing market, and the people who are paying the price are the renters and the homeless of this country.

I want to turn my attention to the banks. Banks are encouraged to lend for housing because the capital they need to hold against mortgages is much less than what they need to hold against loans to businesses, which means, of course, that Australia's banks are addicted to mortgages.

Now I want to turn my attention to monetary policy. This country's monetary policy is oblivious to where the credit goes, as has been evidenced over the past 12 months, where the Reserve Bank has printed $200 billion. Basically, the cheapest money in history has done an awful lot to push up house prices and very little to improve the productive capacity of the nation. Over the ditch, in New Zealand, they've realised that their Reserve Bank can't continue to pretend that housing isn't something that monetary policy should take into account. But here in the Commonwealth of Australian real estate, we are yet to become so enlightened. As a result, winning or losing in the great Australian game of property speculation is likely to have a greater effect on your life than anything else so far as your finances are concerned. Being white- or blue-collar, your level of education and the hours you work now matter far less than how much property you own or how much you stand to inherit. Class in this country is being redefined before our very eyes, and it's being redefined in a way that looks an awful lot like feudalism, which is just the way the Liberals like it. But they have to pretend that a wage slave has a chance, so they serve up this bill and the Family Home Guarantee. Let's be clear, the Family Home Guarantee is a con. It will not help single parents who live on a wage to find a secure and affordable home, because it doesn't actually guarantee anyone a home. What it does is guarantee a loan for the banks. Both the Family Home Guarantee and the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme are government guarantees for low-deposit loans. Under both of those schemes the government insures the first 20 per cent of the loan—this is the critical bit—for the banks. That encourages banks, as a result, to lend to people who they otherwise wouldn't have lent to because the loans are too risky. The banks are encouraged to make those loans under these schemes because, if the borrower defaults, the public purse covers any loss. This, would you believe it, is the government's response to a cooked housing market and a housing crisis in this country. Basically, they want to encourage single parents to borrow more than they can afford in the most overheated housing market in history by providing that the government insures the banks against any losses. That is what the government wants to do, so we get more household debt, higher house prices and yet more public subsidies for the banks, all sold under the fallacy that people's not being able to save for a deposit is the reason they can't afford a home.

Mr Frydenberg: if houses weren't so outrageously expensive and the system wasn't so rigged in favour of the speculators and against people who actually want a home to live in, then people wouldn't need as much money to make their deposit in the first place. This government won't address the structural issues that make Australian housing amongst the most overpriced anywhere on the planet, because this government, led by a property council Prime Minister, is all for property speculation and all for helping out its mates who benefit from it—be they the property developers, the banks or their rank and file who lord over property investment portfolios and who live off the tax concessions that everybody else pays for. Instead, this government's whole response to the housing crisis is to encourage people to spend even more money on housing. What a time to be alive!

We've got an amendment on sheet 1302, circulated in my name, that would reduce this madness just a little. This amendment would make it less likely that the Family Home Guarantee would become a government-sanctioned debt trap for single parents. This amendment would establish in legislation, rather than leaving it to regulation, a minimum deposit requirement for the purchaser for all loans guaranteed by the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation. This amendment would set the minimum deposit requirement at five per cent, which is the current level set under the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme. Loans issued with less than a five per cent deposit are also tracked by APRA as an indicator of high-risk lending. By the prudential regulator's own measure, the Family Home Guarantee as proposed by the government, requiring a mere two per cent deposit for single parents, will encourage and increase higher risk spending. That illustrates that this is a reckless and irresponsible policy. It also indicates that the Family Home Guarantee has nothing to do with helping single mums find secure and affordable housing but is simply about giving the government something to say when asked the questions, which will keep on coming, about what they are doing about the housing crisis that so many Australians are facing.

The government should not be enticing people to take out a loan with less than a five per cent deposit. It certainly shouldn't be enticing single parents into a loan with less than a five per cent deposit. Does the government remember the subprime mortgage crisis? The Australian Greens certainly do.