Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise to speak to this motion today. Let me tell you, one of the reasons I'm in the Liberal Party is that the Liberal Party actually believes in home ownership. While I'm speaking to the issue of freezing rents, I think the best way to get around this issue is to actually own your own house. That is why I'm in the Liberal Party.

I want to quote from the speech that's often considered the original speech, or the manifesto—if I could use that word—of the Liberal Party. That statement is a bit of an oxymoron but anyway. It's interesting to note that Robert Menzies in his Forgotten People speech mentions the word home 23 times. He says that the rich and powerful can look after themselves. He also says that we should not go back to the 'old and selfish notions of laissez-faire' capitalism. If they'd actually read the Forgotten People speech a lot of people would be surprised by that.

I'm happy to give anyone on the other side of the chamber that speech, because you would see that it appeals to those people who just want to remain quiet in the suburbs, who don't need other people telling them what to. They just want to be left alone in their house with their family, and everyone else can get out of their lives. I know I speak for many who feel like that and that's why I'm in the Liberal Party.

I want to talk about what homes mean to the Liberal Party and quote a part of Robert Menzies' speech. Firstly, he describes homes as having a:

… stake in the country. It has responsibility for homes—homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual. I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs …

He is not a big fan of the blowhards. I know a lot of people think the Liberal Party are the blowhard party. We do have blowhards and sometimes we tend to take their line but we shouldn't do that. We are the party of battlers and we've got to remember that. This country is all about 'wealth for toil'. It's founded by the battlers, not the blowhards, and we need to remember that. Menzies says:

It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.

Exactly. Who doesn't love their children?

He says:

The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety—

I can vouch for that. I have to admit that in my youth I drank a lot of beer. When I bought a home—it took a couple of years—I slowly weaned myself off the bottle—

it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.

I have mentioned homes material, homes human and homes spiritual. Let me take them in order. What do I mean by "homes material"? The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own." Your advanced socialist may rave against private property even while he acquires it—

That's a good point there, pointing out the hypocrisy of some people who think we should all own nothing, but meanwhile they're flying jets and everything like that—

but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will. If you consider it, you will see that if, as in the old saying, "the Englishman's home is his castle", it is this very fact that leads on to the conclusion that he who seeks to violate that law by violating the soil of England must be repelled and defeated.

National patriotism, in other words, inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.

Senator McKim, I totally think we need to get people in houses. There's a lot to be said for home ownership. One of the problems we've got with the rental market at the moment is that not enough people own their own homes. I've often ranted against the fact that when Keating made a lot of amendments in the eighties—as you well know, there was a lot of neoliberal stuff that was brought in in the eighties—one of the biggest mistakes that was made was that we didn't have capital gains tax on housing for the wealthy. I'm not against the common man having a house, but you could take, say, five per cent starting at $2½ million or something. There's a level above which you shouldn't have capital gains tax free housing. You've got multimillionaires living in Bondi and the eastern suburbs of Sydney. They buy a house for $3 million, they sell it for $10 million, they clean up $7 million in profit and they don't pay a cent of tax.

Meanwhile, you've got the battlers out there, who get out of bed every morning and put their nose to the grindstone. They will start paying tax above $18,200 at 19c in the dollar plus two per cent for Medicare. They will also lose 50c in the dollar if they're on Newstart, or jobseeker or whatever it's called nowadays. Then they lose another 10½ per cent for super. Earning between 20 and 30 grand, you end up losing 80c out of every dollar you earn, and that's completely absurd. I think we should have a capital gains tax on housing—above $2 million or $3 million; somewhere in that range—and use that to give a tax offset to the low-income earners who struggle. Basically, if you earn less than the cost of living, which, let's say is $40,000 a year, you're actually losing money. Why do we tax people below the cost of living? It is complete nonsense. I'm very passionate about homeownership.

While I know that your intention is good, we do have a bit of a problem at the moment because we've also got a very incompetent RBA, which blew up the housing bubble throughout COVID, even though we already had a housing bubble before that. I should note that in 1985 we had $8 billion in foreign debt. When Keating opened up the economy to foreign banks, by 2008 we had $800 billion in foreign debt. All of that money mainly went into the property market in Sydney and Melbourne, which meant that the housing prices went from four times average earnings to 13 times average earnings.

We've got to start to learn how to control the volume of capital in this country and not let so much money go into housing. At the same time, we don't put any money into manufacturing and being productive. If we're going to get ahead in this country, we have got to stop relying on other countries. As I say to people: if you got washed up on a desert island would you (a) go to the bank, try and manipulate interest rates and get a Fitch credit rating or (b) look to provide essential services to the people like dams, water, housing and productivity? Of course you'd choose the latter. We know that that's exactly what happened in this country about 210 years ago when Lachlan Macquarie came here.

Lachlan Macquarie was the first governor to see Australia as a country, not a colony. He realised that in order to run a country properly you've got to have your own currency. We don't really have our own currency today. We do in name, but what people don't realise is that, whenever we go to build a dam or anything like that, we use foreign currency. This, of course, means that when you build a dam for $1 billion and you borrow $1 billion in foreign currency the first $1 billion in wealth you create has to be repaid offshore. What people don't understand is that not all money printing is the same. If I'm a company and I want to become a bigger company, I can issue shares, or equity. It's not called debt; it's called equity. Equity is title. As a sovereign country, we have title over this country. If I want to build a dam, I can issue shares in a dam that is productive. I don't need to borrow for it. All you need to do is get the RBA to lend $1 billion to whichever state government's going to build the dam, and all they have to do is repay that debt. But I digress a little bit.

The reason why I talk about the RBA and this whole volume of money in the system is that we need to lower the cost of living as well. We currently have a supply shock because of Russia and all these other things. Supply has gone down. What the RBA is going to do is try to crush demand as well by pushing it down. They're going to use an austerity policy. That is complete and utter madness. What we need is a productivity policy that is going to increase supply. Rather than reduce demand and make people suffer through not being able to rent a house or buy their own house, we need to increase productivity. We need to build.

You will get all the neoliberals and all these people who think they're economists, but let me tell you: economists are to finance what climate modellers are to scientists. They rely on assumptions and false ideas. The idea that building dams is going to cause inflation and is a bad thing is completely ridiculous. If you build more dams, more power stations, more roads and better transport infrastructure, you increase supply. If you increase supply and you push the cost of essential services down, then you make it cheaper for business to actually operate. If you make it cheaper for businesses to operate—guess what!—they employ more people. If you employ more people and you're making more money you can pay them more, and then they can afford to buy a house. It becomes a virtuous circle.

Let me say that, while I can't agree with you entirely on the premise of keeping rental levels entirely flat, we do need to look at the way we run this country, and we need to look at becoming much more productive. We've got to stop all this paper shuffling and pandering to markets and start pandering to genuine productivity. That means fewer academics and more tradesmen. We need to get rid of payroll tax in this country by bringing back stamp duty on share trading. It is completely nuts that if I buy a house, a farm, a business or a truck I've got to pay stamp duty but I can flip shares all day on the stock market, which is manipulated by foreign investors, and pay no stamp duty. I'll leave it at that.