Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

It's been two years since the Prime Minister announced Labor's policy—the only demand-side housing policy that has been announced by the Prime Minister, I might say—the Help to Buy scheme. In May 2022, the Prime Minister promised that his shared-equity scheme would be up and running by 1 January 2023, and yet here we are today, in September 2024, and we haven't even seen a vote on this legislation. It's clear now that either it is ridiculously late or, potentially, this policy may never see the light of day. People around Australia have every right to be asking, 'What on earth have the housing ministers been doing all this time?'

To have had this scheme operating by 1 January 2023, when the Prime Minister promised Australians it would be, the bill should have been introduced into the parliament in 2022. Instead, nearly two years later, the government has introduced a poorly designed, poorly targeted bill—the bill we are talking about today. The implementation of Help to Buy is now merely a tick-a-box exercise for Labor to fulfil their stale election commitment. The scheme is utterly underwhelming. It will be eligible to a mere 10,000 households per year and will cost the Commonwealth $5.5 billion, while the government retains a stake of up to 40 per cent in the homes that are purchased. This scheme is tiny compared with the 240,000 new homes required every year to fulfil the government's targeted commitment of 1.2 million homes.

The state of homeownership in this country right now is very bleak. The new National Housing Accord kicked off on 1 July 2024 with a target of 240,000 homes each year. However, in the last 12 months we have seen less than 163,000 new home building approvals across Australia. One new home needs to be built every 2.4 minutes to keep up with Labor's promise to build 1.2 million homes. The HIA is forecasting 41,910 commencements in the 2024 September quarter. These numbers are business as usual under Labor. This is unsurprising, given the state of the construction industry, left in tatters by Labor's union mates at the CFMEU.

Under Labor, housing affordability in Australia has declined to its lowest levels since reporting of records began in 1996. According to CoreLogic, a mortgage holder earning a median income will now use just under 60 per cent of their income to service a loan on a medium-value dwelling in Sydney. The only policies supporting first home buyers are the ones Labor inherited from the former coalition government.

At a time when fewer homes are being built and being approved, it's tougher to find a rental. There are record levels of migration. There were more than 520,000 migrants last year alone. This is an absolute world record in migration numbers. In the Senate economics committee inquiry into this bill, the Grattan Institute submitted:

Within living memory, all Australians had a reasonable chance to own a home. But now, for many Australians the Great Australian Dream of home ownership is becoming a nightmare.

Australians are facing an unacceptable situation where homeownership is out of reach and we have absolutely nothing from the government that meaningfully supports first homeowners. What Australians need is a comprehensive policy agenda to address supply- and demand-side hurdles that is carefully calibrated alongside state and local government and is totally focused on individual homeownership. Instead, what do we get? This pitiful opportunity to co-own a home with the Prime Minister and the Minister for Housing.

The rest of Labor's agenda on housing includes: a target of 1.2 million new homes, which even Labor's own New South Wales Premier, Chris Minns, said won't be achieved; the Housing Australia Future Fund, a thinly veiled excuse to give institutional investors and super funds a leg-up to invest in the housing market by purchasing homes for Australians to rent; and a national housing supply affordability council that has only met once since this parliament. Labor is making the housing crisis so much worse by not building enough homes, by allowing our population to grow faster than properties are being constructed and by advancing a policy approach that prioritises corporate homeownership over individual homeownership.

Under Labor, you can either own your own home with the Prime Minister and Clare O'Neill or rent from the industry super funds. This is not the Australian dream. Let's be clear: there are already shared equity products offered by state governments throughout the country. If somebody in South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria or Western Australia wants to co-own a home with the government, there are already plenty of opportunities for them to do so. In the South Australian scheme, for example, there are more places than people wanting to take them up. With all this in mind, what did Labor think to do? They thought, 'Let's bring in our own shared equity scheme,' even though there is one operating in most states in this country and even though there are available places under existing ones throughout the country. Given there are opportunities across the country to engage with shared equity schemes, it is unclear what gap this bill is seeking to address.

UNSW gave evidence to the committee that the overlap between the proposed bill and the state schemes risked adding confusing complexity for potential service providers. Help to Buy gives the government a talking point so it can be seen to be addressing the housing crisis in the country without actually doing anything. The government should be removing barriers to homeownership for young Australians, not inserting themselves into the process. Economist and housing expert Peter Tulip told the committee that the scheme was a distraction from the broader supply challenges. Economics professor John Quiggin agreed that the scheme was a very small solution to a big problem and something which has been designed on the basis of budgetary cosmetics rather than on saying, 'What is the scale of the problem and what do we need to do?'

You would think that if you were 18 months late in bringing forward legislation like this you would be looking at something that was in perfect condition and perfect order, but what have we got here? The committee inquiry revealed that no public consultation was undertaken in the drafting of this legislation. That has clearly materialised in poor targeting, bad design and poor value for taxpayers' money. Major questions remain unanswered: What is the scheme's eligibility criteria? Who is eligible to apply? What happens if you make improvements to your home? What happens if you have a $5,000 repair to the roof? Who picks up the tab for that? Well, there are no answers in this bill either. Let's assume that everything goes really well, you end up buying a home with the government, you own 60 per cent and the government owns 40 per cent. Then you receive wonderful news in your life: you are expecting a child—or you may be expecting your second or third. You need to upgrade. You need to move home. The government will then say, 'Thank you very much; we'll take our money back.' Good luck upgrading, because you've just had 40 per cent ripped out of the proceeds of your home. So you could be forced to sell, you could have the money taken off you and your opportunity to move into your next home will be next to nothing. You can understand why this is not wanted by Australians at the moment.

The additional borrowing of the Commonwealth to fund this program is $5.5 billion. We say there are infinitely better ways of spending $5.5 billion than making people enter into these very dubious arrangements that many Australians clearly don't want. Further questions that aren't answered in these bills—bills that are, as I said, 18 months late—include: Will the ATO be auditing people's incomes? If you've got an income threshold, will the ATO be auditing you each year to determine whether you're going to have the rug pulled from under you and sell your house? What are the reporting obligations? What happens if you fall behind in your mortgage repayments? Many people and families are struggling under those increasing mortgage payments, so what happens if you fall behind in your payments? Is that when the government comes along, rips the rug from underneath you and says, 'Thank you very much; it's time for you to sell and we'll take our 40 per cent back'? You'd think the answers to these questions would all be contained in these bills. You'd think the Minister for Housing would have done some work in the last 18 months and given people some answers. But we don't have these answers in these bills.

To make matters worse, the scheme's price and income caps would make it redundant on day one. The price caps set by Labor fall below the median house values in every capital in Australia with the exception of Melbourne. In Sydney, the price cap of $950,000 looks like a sick joke when considering the median house price in Sydney in April this year was $1.421 million. That's not all; the income caps for eligible participants are totally unviable. The required income to service a mortgage to cover the difference between the government stake and the overall value sits above the income caps. In practice, this means a first home buyer could never conceivably purchase a home at the government's price cap. These caps led PropTrack to estimate that Sydneysiders would be unable to purchase 96 per cent of the houses on the market using the Help to Buy scheme.

No answers, no idea. The government want us to come in here and support the bills and this scheme—a blank cheque for $5.5 billion—so they can force people to sell their homes. What lenders are participating in the scheme? We've got no idea there either. Who are the lenders? Are there going to be restrictions on who can borrow in conjunction with owning a home with the government? None of these questions are answered.

The bigger concern here is this: this is a government waving the white flag on homeownership in this country. In 20 months of Labor government we've seen nothing on first home buyers. They should see the light on the policy we took to the last election to enable first home buyers to access their superannuation to help them fund a deposit for their first home. Our policy, which we took to the last election, said, 'If you're a first home buyer, you can withdraw up to $50,000 of your own super and use that to contribute to a deposit to own your own house, and then when you sell the first home you're required to recontribute back into your super.' So your money is working for you at a time you need it most, and then when you sell your home and move to your next one you recontribute to your super so your retirement income is protected. It means you and your money are working for you. The Labor Party could never support that because the industry super funds tell Labor what to do. I say to senators opposite: you're just a vessel for the unions, and you might agree with them on a lot of things but surely there are times when they tell you to do something you don't agree with and you don't walk off the cliff with them. That's clearly what those opposite have done with this policy.

It is clear that allowing first home buyers to utilise their own super to help buy their own home and then requiring them to recontribute to it is a good policy. But this is all in the broader context in which these bills fail. We have a legacy of coalition policies that are helping first home buyers, but in almost 2.5 years we have seen absolutely nothing from this government. The entire housing market is crumbling around the new housing minister. Approvals are down, new home builds are down, first home buyers are at some of their lowest levels, rents are skyrocketing and, as for vacancy rates, trying to find a rental is extraordinarily tough. Our ability to build homes is being weakened by the day because we have insolvency after insolvency in the sector. And what do we get from this government? We get a pitiful shell of a bill with no answers to the questions in front of us. It is simply not good enough.

My final point highlights the chaotic dysfunctional nature of the housing agenda of this government. The Prime Minister went to the election promising that this scheme would open the door to homeownership for tens of thousands of Australians from 1 July 2023. But what the government didn't tell Australians was that it had no constitutional power to implement the scheme. Treasury confirmed at a committee public hearing that the scheme would operate only in states that passed legislation to refer powers to the Commonwealth and, in doing so, consent to the scheme. Treasury has provided no schedule or update on when the states will pass the required legislation. The bill, even if it does pass this parliament, is not effective until the state parliaments pass that legislation themselves.

You can't just bring in a bill 18 months late with no answers, no clarity and no certainty for Australians. For all those reasons, I reiterate that, as we said before the election, we do not support this bill. It shouldn't be called the Help to Buy Bill; it should be called the 'Force to Sell Bill', because that's what it will end up doing to Australians. We cannot in good consciousness support this bill. The scheme is a waste of taxpayers' money, and the $5.5 billion would be better employed by the Commonwealth in driving housing supply and supporting first home buyers with more effective policies.

Australians do not want to own a home with Anthony Albanese or Clare O'Neil. That is not the Australian dream. The Labor Party has given up on the Australian dream of homeownership, and Australians are paying the price.