Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week's Courier Mail is reporting: 'New tent cities have been set up near some of Brisbane's busiest intersections as Queensland emerges as the epicentre of the housing crisis. The latest tent city to hit Brisbane is at E.E. McCormick Place, where tents can be seen sitting on the edge of a major arterial road, with clothes hanging on lines and camp showers draping off trees.' The chief executive of Queensland Council of Social Services—QCOSS—Aimee McVeigh, said the housing crisis was not being properly addressed, going on to say: 'It's incredibly heartbreaking but unfortunately pretty predictable that we're continuing to see people, including families with children, who don't have a safe place to call home.'

I've visited large tent cities in South Brisbane on the Brisbane River banks, in Mackay and in Townsville, and I've seen smaller tent cities in far too many provincial centres to list. Speaking with those residents, I was horrified to find just how many were families with children. The really sad part is that mum and dad may both have jobs. Yet, without a home for the children, one parent has to give up working to look after their children, because a tent is no place for a child. There are children living in tents. Losing that income guarantees that family will remain homeless. Thank you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The truth is the housing and rent crisis is out of control. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It's now $627. That's an increase of 40 per cent over just a few years. The national rental vacancy is at just one per cent, which is far below the three per cent rate that is considered a healthy market. In 1987, the average house cost 2.8 times the average income. Today a house is 9.7 times the average income. Additionally, under this government, real wages in Australia have gone backwards six per cent. Not only are houses more expensive; working Australians are further away from being able to afford them. Many people under 30 have given up hope of ever owning a home. What a failure of governance under Labor! Surely the prime directive of a government is to leave this beautiful country in a better state than you found it in. The reverse is happening; it's worse.

Over the past two decades, under the Liberal and Labor 'uniparty', wealth inequality in Australia has increased dramatically and substantially. According to the University of New South Wales, the wealth of the top 20 per cent of people increased 82 per cent, and the wealth of the bottom 20 per cent only increased 20 per cent. That, though, does not stop the university grabbing just as much of that wealth for themselves as they can. The university lobby group, Universities Australia, recently sent my office a press release stating they could prove that 702,000 foreign students didn't put strain on the housing market. Actually, they didn't say 702,000; the release rather dishonestly spoke of the 200,000 new students who arrived this year rather than the total number of foreign students, which is 702,000, all needing a bed and a roof.

To achieve this feat of denial, Universities Australia use a simple statistical trick. They use the vacancy rate as an indicator instead of rental price. Like any supply-and-demand industry, rental prices will rise until demand matches supply. This means vacancy rates should be constant across different areas, because the balancing factor is not vacancy rates; it's rental price.

Rentals are higher near a university, as landlords price into their rents the ability to have three or four students per bedroom. And, knowing how those rates are being paid with so many tenants, local councils hike up rates to exploit overcrowding.

The national vacancy rate across Australia has fallen from 2.42 per cent in 2021 to 1.09 per cent in January 2024 because of the housing catastrophe. Why? In part because foreign students all need a bed, and more so because two million new arrivals all need a bed. Universities couldn't care less about everyday Australians sleeping in tents, in public parks and under bridges. Universities are motivated to grab the money foreign students pay towards obscene multimillion-dollar university salaries. University fees are on average eight times what they were when the Hawke Labor government reintroduced tertiary fees in 1989.

I'm pleased to see racketeering mentioned in this motion. So many Australian industries are being controlled for the benefit of well-connected and mostly foreign wealth funds, acting against the financial interests of everyday Australians. Racketeering could be a separate inquiry, so entrenched has the practice become.

When it comes to ignoring working families, Labor has form. It's clear. The reason I'm raising this in a housing speech is quite simple: university affordability is no better than it was before HECS, except now children of everyday Australians are left with a debt so high that they can't ever afford their own home. So many young people contact my office—Australians who have done everything society has asked of them. They have studied hard, worked hard, stayed out of trouble and got a university degree, and now have a good job, only to find they were lied to. Real wages in Australia are back to 2010 levels, while houses are twice as expensive as they were in 2010. HECS debt comes off a person's ability to repay a loan, which means its reduces their borrowing power below the price of an entry level home. They can't borrow. Meanwhile, rents are so high that they have no ability to even save a deposit. Society is lying to our young Australians. This is not on the Labor Party alone; these problems date back to the Hawke Labor government and were made far worse under the Howard Liberal government—the uniparty at work! The message I have for recent graduates is one of hope. One Nation's housing policy looks to the future, offering commonsense solutions to help more Australians purchase their own home while at the same time reducing rent.

Let's have an overview of our housing policy. One Nation's housing policy includes lowering immigration to sustainable levels to reduce housing demand; in fact, I will go further and say, with 2.3 million people on residence visas, we need to send some home. We would ban foreign ownership of residential property to increase housing supply; allow a portion of a person's superannuation to be invested in home purchase; ditch Labor's housing future fund and invest those funds into creating a new people's mortgage scheme, offering a five per cent deposit and a five per cent interest rate; allow people with a HECS debt to roll their debt into a people's mortgage account, improving their ability to obtain and service a loan—this is common sense and humane; and implement a five-year moratorium on charging GST on the materials used in new home construction, which will make new homes more affordable, taking $1.4 billion off the sale price of new homes over the next four years.

Here are some more details. Non-bank financial institutions stand ready right now to take on the mortgage market and administer our people's home loans. They're ready. Indeed, some are in the market now in company with aggregators. It's One Nation policy to create a people's bank to provide Australia's obscenely profitable banking cartel with real competition. We don't have four major banks; we have one major bank with four different logos, with the same controlling interest—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and First State. Efficiency in banking, including in the housing market, will not come from more regulation; it will come from more competition, driving real accountability. That's exactly what the original Commonwealth Bank did when it was formed in 1911.

The cost of building a house now is a massive problem. One of the reasons costs keep going up is Australian construction codes. Construction codes are meant to make sure our houses aren't made of straw and won't blow down if the big bad wolf, or a cyclone, huffs and puffs. Unfortunately, Australia's construction codes have gone woke; they're no longer just about safe houses. The National Construction Code was amended in 2022 to require all new buildings to be NDIS compliant—every single building to be NDIS compliant. Alan Kohler reports that global construction consultant Rider Levett Bucknall estimates that this adds up to $49,500 to the cost of a dwelling. Why should a young family have to shell out an extra $50,000 on features they'll never need in order to buy their family home?

Some of the requirements border on ridiculous. There must be a stepless entry to the front door, so the days of steps are over—even a handful up to your front porch. You'd have to pay for a ramp or potentially face having your home deemed illegal.

Remember, this applies to every new building. All new homes must be built with heavy-duty, reinforced walls and a toilet. These are ostensibly so grab rails can be installed, even though they may never be installed. Where did you want to put the toilet? You didn't think you could just put it where you wanted and where it's convenient, did you? Are you considering skipping a toilet on the ground floor and only having one upstairs to save on plumbing? Think again. The construction codes say no. You're forced to have one on the ground floor whether it's cost effective for you or not and whether you need it or not. The codes now dictate where the toilet must be placed. It must be against a wall, with huge spaces left around it. As the price of land continues to go up, many houses simply don't have the floor space to accommodate these new requirements without sacrificing others.

Young people are paying for this, even though they don't need it. No doubt these criteria are helpful for people with a disability, yet there's no reason to make them mandatory in every new house for people without a disability. Many in government claim that, when it comes to housing, the problem is supply. When these changes to the construction codes alone are costing an extra $50,000 a house, there's no hope of boosting supply, because Australians can't afford to build. Construction codes are getting so long and complex that we practically need to be lawyers to decipher them. That's no slight on our tradies. Most are far smarter and more useful than lawyers anyway. Our tradies should be using their hands on power tools and paintbrushes, not having to turn over pages and pages of regulations telling them how to swing a hammer. The same applies to our farmers, who are buried in paperwork.

Unions like the CFMEU endorse these complex additions because it means more work for them. Meanwhile, quotes to build a new house leave Australians gobsmacked. The people who can afford these expensive houses are millionaire foreign buyers. There's no doubt that foreigners are buying houses here, and that comes at the expense of an Australian who can't get into a house. Where are the Labor government's union mates when it comes to the issue of foreign buyers? They're completely silent. The government calls it foreign investment. Wrong, it's not investment. This is foreign ownership. Worst of all, Australians can't believe what the government tells us about how many foreigners are buying houses. The Foreign Investment Review Board says foreigners buy less than one per cent of houses, yet the New South Wales state government charges a foreign purchase tax, a surcharge, and records that the number is more than double that. Surveys say it's much higher.

When you ask real estate agents who they are selling to, as the NAB property survey does, they say the number of foreign buyers is 10 per cent. What about shelf companies, trusts with beneficial interests or so-called dark money in foreign retail purchases? Are foreign buyers of housing sneaking through the cracks? I've been trying to get this question answered since November with a series of technical questions to the Australian Taxation Office. They run a data-matching program which matches the 2.4 million names of every seller and purchaser of every house in the country against ATO records. Theres's a simple question about those records: how many of those 2.4 million names are Australian citizens, and how many aren't—how many are foreign? Trying to get the ATO to answer that question is like trying to get blood out of a stone, yet we're still selling houses en masse to foreigners.

To be frank, whatever the answer, one house a foreigner buys is one too many, especially in the housing crisis. We're in the middle of a housing crisis, a catastrophe, when there should be zero foreign ownership of Australian housing. It's in Australia's interest to make it zero foreign housing, just like Canada and New Zealand have recently done, yet where are the Labor government and unions like the CFMEU? They encourage more immigration and more foreign ownership and push the price of houses higher, as do the Greens, and then want a rent ceiling.

When Labor and the union-backed super funds aren't encouraging foreigners to snatch homes away from Australians, they're making sure renters will have multinational corporations as landlords—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. The concept is known as 'build to rent'. It's about letting huge corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard build housing estates and unit blocks so that people will be stuck renting from them forever. The government touts this as a solution to the housing crisis. Creating forever renters who are paying corporate company landlords is not a fix; it's serfdom.

A real solution is One Nation's policies to get more Australians owning their own home. The Albanese Labor government is responding to a problem of their own making.

Housing approvals are falling as red and green tape slow down the approval process and as building codes put developers off. Housing approvals are the lowest they've been for many years. Construction is falling as costs rise both from an increase in raw materials and from an increase in interest rates—and from an increase in the number of bureaucrats that you've appointed instead of tradies. Sales are falling in line with falling real wages and increasing home prices. A labour shortage is correctly blamed, yet we had 2.3 million new arrivals, and only a few thousand of those were builders.

As I said, it is a problem of the government's own making. The only response the government has is to throw taxpayers' money at the problem. Without blocks of land, without builders, without tradies, without building materials and without buyers, money can't achieve anything. One Nation's housing policy will get young Australians into their own homes—even those with a HECS debt that is preventing them saving for their own home and those working families living under bridges, in tents, in caravan parks, in showgrounds and in city parks. It's time for new, commonsense ideas. If people care about Australians, then it's time for One Nation.