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

The government have done everything they can to make housing in Australia so much worse than it was when they came to office over two years ago. All you need to do is look at what the RBA said in their announcement last week, where they said that they were looking to now only hit target inflation in 2027 because, 'In part, this owes to a stronger outlook for domestic demand'.

The government is spending too much money, which is driving increased demand from the public sector, and that is keeping the pressure on the Reserve Bank. The Reserve Bank is considering its position on whether it needs to increase rates, rather than cut rates, as we've seen in comparable economies. What does this all mean? It means that we have a persistent inflation problem, which not only makes things much harder for prospective homeowners but also for renters. It comes on top of a series of disasters in the housing portfolio, which has recently been flipped by the Prime Minister in his reshuffle, where he sacked the old housing minister and appointed a new one.

The problem with the new housing minister is that the new housing minister is committed to the same policies as the last housing minister. We've seen, frankly, a disaster in relation to this Housing Australia Future Fund slush fund, we've seen a failure on the housing targets and then we've seen this build-to-rent idea. The idea here is for foreign corporations, foreign fund managers, to become the landlords to Australians. This is a massive perversion of the Australian dream—a twisting of the Australian dream, from a dream where people own their own houses to an idea where your house is owned by BlackRock, Vanguard or Cbus. That is a disgusting perversion of the Australian dream, which has been perpetrated by this Labor government. We've seen today that the new minister, Minister O'Neil, has said on radio, 'And what I can tell you is the Treasury modelling for this bill tells us that we'll have an additional 160,000 houses'. That is the end of the quote, and it's also false in the sense that Treasury never did that modelling—and that has been exposed as a huge mistake. The point here is not so much that the minister has made a gaffe—I understand that people get things wrong from time to time—it is that the policy itself is a sick idea because it gives up on the idea of individual ownership and agency and hands the keys to the city, so to speak, to the foreign fund managers. Foreign fund managers are the only people that are going to get a tax cut to build a house. Go figure! We've now seen the disaster of the shared equity schemes, which the government hasn't even brought on for a vote.

When you think about this broader position on housing, which is a massive problem the Australian people face, we've always been a country where people could afford to buy a house of their own. Now we have a position where that is getting away from the average worker. So what are the things that the Commonwealth government could do to help here? There are limited options because we don't run the planning system, so the interventions from the Commonwealth government need to be very carefully calibrated.

We hear nothing from the new minister or the old minister on banking and lending policy. We hear very little on super, which is a Commonwealth issue, other than trying to help the big super funds buy the houses and lease them out to Australians like they are serfs. We have seen this with the Housing Australia Future Fund, which will go down in history, I'm sure, as one of Labor's greatest boondoggle slush funds. These slush funds are never good ideas, because you end up running them for the unions and other vested interests. In this case, I think this Housing Australia Future Fund wanting to partner with the super funds will be a disaster, because Australians don't want to lease their home or rent their house from a super fund; they want to own it themselves. So you see nothing on banking, nothing on super. The only things on tax are proposals that are bandied around in Labor's caucus to increase taxes on houses like negative gearing or capital gains tax, or of course the idea that you cut taxes for the build-to-rent class—the Vanguards, BlackRocks and the other foreign fund managers.

So far this has been Labor's worst policy ever, you would have to say. There are a few to compete with, but housing has been a disaster. The people who are paying the price here are the renters and the prospective homebuyers, who have seen the Australian dream slip away.