Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Homeownership is absolutely a matter of public importance. The price of housing in this country has gone up by 13.1 per cent since the last election. Families are struggling to pay their mortgages. Families are struggling to pay their rent. Someone with a mortgage has seen their interest rates rise 12 times under this government. We've spoken many times in this chamber about that equating to a family or someone with an average mortgage of $750,000 being $35,000 a year worse off. That's an extraordinary amount of money. It's basic maths that, with interest rates doubling or repayments doubling, if your loan repayment was $4,000 a month when this government came into power, your loan repayment now sits at around $8,000 a month. That's a lot of extra money to have to find.

In the US, in the UK, in Canada and in New Zealand, interest rates have already come down. This government keeps pointing to the opposition and saying that it inherited this and it inherited that. This government has been in office for almost a full term. All of our global contemporaries have been able to manage inflation. They've been able to see their interest rates come down. That hasn't happened in Australia, because we have homegrown inflation here. That is what we are dealing with now: inflation that is here because of the actions and inaction of this government. Australian families, Australian small businesses and young Australians who are trying to break into the property market are paying the price for that.

All we keep hearing about is how all the coalition want to do is raid super and raid piggy banks. I have some news for the government: the money in our super belongs to us. It does not belong to any government. It does not belong to any super fund. It is money that has been taken out of the salaries of everyday Australians. It's been sequestered in an account, and we're told that, if we want to use that for housing security, we're bad and we're raiding our own money. I've spoken about this before. Explain to me why a woman at 55, in the largest-growing cohort of homelessness, cannot access her super to help her buy a home but 10 years later can use that same super to pay rent to somebody else. Explain that to me.

Australian households have been in 18 months of household recession, and the latest national accounts show us the slowest GDP growth since the 1990s. Yet this government goes, 'Here's Help to Buy; this will solve the housing problem.' No it won't. It's a niche program open to only 10,000 households each financial year, and it's going to cost $5.5 billion. There is a lot that we don't know about it. What happens when significant repairs have to be undertaken? What happens if major construction needs to be done? Maybe the family wants to do an extension. Do they have to then sell their home and move somewhere else? Do they have to go back to the government for some more money? Who ends up keeping that equity if they choose to spend that themselves? What changes? We don't know. We have no idea what happens, because the government haven't given us any details on it, which is pretty consistent with the way they operate.

They say there will be 10,000 spaces. We have something like 2.9 million Australians living in rental properties. So we're going to offer an opportunity to 10,000 people to get into their own home, or 10,000 households, per year. This highlights that this government has no new ideas, that there is no real investment in housing, that there are not enough homes being built, that there are no real initiatives for first home buyers and that there are no initiatives for renters who wish to get out of the rental cycle and own their own home. This is entirely unacceptable, and there absolutely needs to be some fundamental rework of policies to actually deliver housing to Australians and deliver opportunities for Australians to own their own home.