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

I rise to take note of additional information related to the Economics Legislation Committee inquiry into the Treasury Laws Amendment (Build to Rent) Bill 2024 and Capital Works (Build to Rent Misuse Tax) Bill 2024 and move:

That the Senate take note of the documents.

This is a bizarre priority when the nation is very focused on housing issues, whether you are a younger person or an older person. To have a government in Canberra, for almost three years, prioritise giving a tax cut to foreign entities, foreign corporations or foreign fund managers—it could be BlackRock or Vanguard, or it could be a sovereign wealth fund—so that they can purchase Australian houses and construct houses in this country that Australians will never ever own is beyond bizarre.

This model of perpetual renting is underpinned by this government. This government has decided that it will prioritise the interests of foreign fund managers over the punters. That is the reality, and that is why it passed—through a guillotine last year—a bill that prioritises the interests of foreign fund managers. This, of course, suits the foreign fund managers, but it also suits the great benefactors of the organised Labor movement today, the super funds. It suits them down to a tee. In fact, in the public hearing into this bill I was able to ask the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia what they thought of the idea. I asked, 'Do you think the Australian people want to rent their house from a super fund?' Mr Clare, who was the official from ASFA, said, 'I think that they would be very happy with institutionally owned residential property.' I think that Mr Clare is wrong, and I think the government has a warped set of priorities because it is a government for vested interests, underpinned here by this agenda.

Cameron Murray, who's an independent economist, has said that most houses in Australia today are owned directly by Australians: 67 per cent are owned by homeowners and over 30 per cent are owned by private individuals. Then there is public housing. The whole idea of build-to-rent is to turf the individual out and to bring in the institution. That's what you do when you run the country for three years for a few vested interests. When we had an opportunity to talk to the people on the front line of the housing crisis, the Housing Industry Association, we asked them: 'Where would this priority—build-to-rent—sit if you were going to try to solve the nation's housing crisis? Would it be in your top 10 issues?' They told the committee examining this bill that it would not be in the top 20 or 30. Of course, the reason that housing is such a major issue and the reason that younger Australians in particular feel the Australian dream is getting further and further out of reach is housing construction has collapsed under this government, it takes longer than ever to assemble a deposit, and the government's solutions do not work in the main.

If you look at the data going back into the last few parliaments, the former government built almost 200,000 houses in each year on average. It went as high as 220,000 houses—