Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I know. That's true. We have to look at making superannuation accessible. One of the criticisms we hear about letting people access their super is that it will push up house prices. It's true there will be more money to buy houses, but the point is that superannuation, by default, if it's not pushing up house prices, is pushing up the price of shares and therefore making it harder. If you're not on the stock exchange, for example, where most of the money in superannuation is invested, you find it much harder to access capital. So, as for that argument that somehow letting superannuation buy your house is going to push up house prices, I'll turn it around and say that superannuation has been pushing up the stock market for years, making it easier for the big end of town to access cheap capital while small businesses find it harder to access cheap capital. So we've got to think about that.

The other thing I disagree with is that we need more investment in property in Australia. I recommend that everyone listen to a great speech given a few weeks ago by a bloke by the name of Matt Barrie. It's called 'Put another Aussie on the barbie'. As he said, Australia has the second-highest rate of supply of housing in the world. We build more houses per capita than most other countries. While I accept there are problems with council regulation and all that, as there always are lots of problems with regulation, I think the idea that we need to be building more and more houses while we ignore (1) building essential infrastructure that provides essential services and (2) building more manufacturing and developing a manufacturing industry where we add value to our minerals is totally wrong. I think we have too big a housing sector in this country, and it is brought about in part by immigration. Because 30 per cent of Australians aren't born here, you have a massive diversion of resources, and the two big diversions of resources are houses and holes—effectively, mining and housing. That's killing our middle sector, which is manufacturing, and the capacity for people to compete even in our essential services.

I will just refer to one interesting thing from 'Put another Aussie on the barbie': there is a crane index, and Sydney, I think, has the highest number of cranes in the world. Sydney has more cranes than New York, Boston, Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Portland, Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary combined. So we do not have a problem with building houses in this country. What we have is a problem where we are totally focused on building houses and we aren't focused on rewarding the people who actually get out of bed and put their noses to the grindstone. Rather than spending more taxpayer money on building houses when you only have to lower immigration by 10,000 to achieve the same result, we need to lower income tax so that hardworking Australians have more money in their pockets and can save up faster, own their own houses and actually learn to settle down and have a sense of purpose in their lives.