Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I indicate that we will not be supporting this bill or these amendments. The reason for that is that we believe that the government, having presided over a massive collapse in housing construction—from as high as 220,000 houses in 2018 down to 160,000 houses this year, the same amount of houses that we had in 1989 when the population was just 17 million—has created a terrible situation for so many, particularly younger, Australians—millennials, gen Z—who feel that the Australian dream is out of reach for them. A large part of that is because of the collapse in housing construction. It's very hard to solve this problem of housing—we all care about housing—unless you get the houses built. Ultimately, the numbers don't lie. We're down to 160,000 houses this year. So we are in a terrible position in this country on the supply side. The government, seemingly having given up on supply, now wants us to consider a demand-side bill for which no modelling has been done by the government on its impact and which is very clearly only going to work at the absolute margins for very few people.

These shared-equity schemes have been massively unpopular for cultural reasons. Australians do not want to co-own their house with any government, and the reason that these schemes have been so unpopular at the state and territory level is all the problems that that proposes. The Australian dream is not about co-owning your house with Mr Albanese or any government.

These shared-equity schemes have been undersubscribed at the state level, and so the idea that the Commonwealth would come in now and seek to put in place a shared-equity scheme as their only demand-side measure, without any other consideration of other demand-side policies that they may be able to deploy to support what is ultimately a supply challenge, is very regrettable. So we are opposed to the Help to Buy Bill for cultural reasons. But we are also opposed to it because it is not very imaginative. There are other things that the government could have done to help people with a deposit. They could have opened up superannuation, but they don't want to do that because that doesn't suit their vested interests. They could have looked at the lending laws. It's pretty hard to get a first house without a mortgage, but they haven't bothered to look at the mortgage rules. This is their only policy.

As we traversed this at Senate estimates with Senator Gallagher, the Minister for Finance, she made it very clear that this is the government's only demand-side policy. This is it—a friendless shared-equity scheme, one that will cost the Commonwealth $5.5 billion and offer a maximum of 40,000 places. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, we need to be building about a quarter of a million houses a year in this country. This is a tiny but very expensive scheme which has already proven to be very unpopular.

I indicate that we will be opposing this bill. We will be opposing all of the amendments in this debate, and I look forward to asking some questions now we're in committee of the whole. I might see if others want to make a contribution before I do that.