Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks very much, Acting Deputy President Cox, for confirming that I do have the call. I will take the interjections from Senator Wong and Senator Watt here and turn the question back around. Why are you putting forward legislation that will provide fractional help to 0.2 of one per cent of Australian renters and actually disadvantage the other 99.8 per cent of Australian renters? That is the question that you have to explain to the Australian people and, in particular, to Australian renters, 99.8 per cent of whom are going to be disadvantaged by this legislation, because, as with so much of your government's housing policy, you are going to contribute yet again to turbocharging house prices in Australia, which, of course, will price more and more people out of the market.

I find it strange that the Greens have to explain to you why making the market and housing less affordable for 99.8 per cent of renters is a bad thing, but I'm going to give it a go. The reason that it's a bad thing is that, over a long period of time now, we have seen the creation of a housing bubble. There are a lot of reasons for that. One is the political stitch-up between Labor and the coalition on massive tax breaks for property speculators—about $196 billion of tax concessions for property speculators over a decade. That drives up house prices. So, when someone wants to get in the market and buy their first home, they are competing at auction with someone who might own two, three, five, 10, 50 or 100 investment properties, or, in a small number of cases, many hundreds of investment properties. Those property speculators have the advantage of these massive tax concessions in the form of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

In the early years of the pandemic, we also saw the Reserve Bank of Australia engage in massive money printing or quantitative easing. They printed about $400 billion worth of money. Of course, that was effectively free money to the retail banks. They turned around and lent a large proportion of that effectively free money printed by the RBA to their highest margin product, which was, of course, home loans, again turbocharging the housing bubble. We all remember the massive spike in house prices that occurred in the first 18 months to two years of the pandemic, turbocharged by the Reserve Bank of Australia in a money-printing extravaganza that a former governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, admitted was the wrong decision and was overegged. Now Labor wants to come in and contribute yet again to the housing bubble in Australia.

What Labor need to explain is why they're so keen to see this legislation progress, given that it is literally a lottery that only 0.2 of one per cent of the renters of Australia will be successful in. And, yes, it will provide that very small number of people—somewhere in the region of 10,000—with a very small marginal benefit, but it will be to the detriment of the other 99.8 per cent. That's what Labor has to explain here.

It's not just the Greens saying that this is going to push up house prices. This bill was taken to a Senate inquiry where we heard a range of expert evidence that this legislation would push up house prices. For example, Professor John Quiggin, professor of economics at the University of Queensland, said:

These schemes have been around forever, but the money is eventually capitalised into house prices, so the beneficiaries gain at the expense of everyone else.

So what Labor are going to need to justify to the renters of Australia—who are not exclusively but overwhelmingly younger Australians—is why they want to put upward pressure on house prices and price more and more renters out of the housing market. That's what Labor have to explain, and they've been abjectly unable to explain that—as we know from Labor's failure to invest in constructing new affordable social housing and from Labor's failure to accept the suggestion of the Greens, who are in here fighting for renters, that we should have a cap on rent increases in Australia to provide renters with relief from rents that have gone up by 30 per cent since the Labor Party came into office. Let's have a look at people on JobSeeker.

Honourable senators interjecting—