Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to pose the question: what is it when you do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result? The answer, in the apocryphal quote from Einstein, is of course insanity. Yet we have those on the opposite side, particularly on the crossbench, the Greens, proposing price caps. We saw the Labor government embrace price caps with the gas industry, which has been an absolute failure. We've seen price caps tried throughout 3,000 years of economic history. We have records of price caps going back to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and we have the records showing that even then price caps failed. In fact, they did precisely the opposite of what they were set out to do. And now we have the Australian Greens, the alliance partner of this Labor government, talking about price caps in rent.

But, you see, price caps in rent have been tried before as well, particularly in the United States, and they just simply don't work. In fact, they do precisely the opposite of what they're supposed to do. They deter new investment in housing stocks, and new investment is exactly what you want if you want a long-term trend to put downward pressure on rental prices. We have 3,000 years of economic history, and probably the only issue that just about all economists would agree on is that price caps do not work. But, yet again, we have the tail wagging the dog, the Greens driving Labor towards another price cap.