Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I commend Senator Smith for putting forward this matter of public importance, because it touches on the two failures of this government. Firstly, the government has reverted to the traditional Labor approach of spending too much money and therefore needing to tax the Australian people too heavily. Secondly, Labor has failed on housing—failed to house young Australians and failed to provide pathways for people to own their own houses. I don't think I need to sit here and give the Senate an address on how the government has failed on these issues, because people know; people don't need to be convinced.

But, on the issue of taxation, it is the case that the government has been forced to raise a series of new taxes to pay for its new spending. It has had to increase income taxes. You see the hilarious presentation of the stage 3 recalibration as a tax cut, when what you see is the reinsertion of the 37c tax bracket and, therefore, the reemergence of bracket creep as a permanent feature of our tax system. Who would have thought, when we came into this parliament when it started almost two years ago, that we would see the parliament reintroduce a tax bracket which was abolished because it was killing aspiration? The 37c threshold is an aspiration killer. If you do an extra shift or do longer hours or do a second job, you are now going to pay higher taxes because of the reinsertion of this tax bracket.

You will see higher personal income taxes under Labor. You will see higher taxes on superannuation. But we don't know how these new taxes will apply to the Prime Minister or to his cabinet colleagues. And then you will see new taxes on franking credits. You see higher taxes across the board to pay for this new spending. This comes from a Labor Party which laughably promised no new taxes.

The issue of housing is perhaps more personal and more acute for many Australians, because I think a lot of Australians expected that the government would have done better here. What you've seen is a flatlining of construction, fewer houses being built and a large increase in immigration. That has meant that fewer Australians are able to access a home.

What you've seen from the government are callous schemes. Help to Buy, which was the centrepiece of their housing policy from the election, is based on a state scheme that no-one wants to use. Very few Australians use the state based shared-equity schemes. So federal Labor goes to the election saying, 'This is the centrepiece of our housing plan.' Bearing in mind that the government itself is promising 1.2 million houses over the next five years—targets it will never meet—the centrepiece of its plan is Help to Buy, which provides 10,000 places. It is a pimple on the elephant's backside, at best. That is their offering on housing: Help to Buy and a failure on the housing targets. Premier Minns in New South Wales laughs and laughs at Mr Albanese and Dr Chalmers and says, 'We will never meet these housing targets in Sydney; we will never meet the New South Wales housing targets.' You've got wall-to-wall Labor governments, and you can't build the houses. The government programs here are absolutely ridiculous.

What you don't see from this government is an interest in trying to tilt the scales in favour of first home buyers. You don't see any Treasury minister discussing whether there is a high cost of regulation that's impacting the banks' ability to make a loan. It's pretty hard to get a house if you can't get a mortgage, I would have thought. There are cobwebs there; there is nothing there. Then, of course, what you never ever hear them discuss is what role super could play in helping first home buyers get into a house. The reason is that they are the party of vested interests. As Alfred Deakin said a hundred years ago, the problem with Labor is that it is beholden to vested interests, to the people that run the preselections, support the Labor party and write the policy. The policy they never want to see is opening up super for first home buyers, because they want the donations into the Labor Party. It's disgusting.