Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's been two years since the Prime Minister announced Labor's policy—the only demand-side housing policy that has been announced by the Prime Minister, I might say—the Help to Buy scheme. In May 2022, the Prime Minister promised that his shared-equity scheme would be up and running by 1 January 2023, and yet here we are today, in September 2024, and we haven't even seen a vote on this legislation. It's clear now that either it is ridiculously late or, potentially, this policy may never see the light of day. People around Australia have every right to be asking, 'What on earth have the housing ministers been doing all this time?'

To have had this scheme operating by 1 January 2023, when the Prime Minister promised Australians it would be, the bill should have been introduced into the parliament in 2022. Instead, nearly two years later, the government has introduced a poorly designed, poorly targeted bill—the bill we are talking about today. The implementation of Help to Buy is now merely a tick-a-box exercise for Labor to fulfil their stale election commitment. The scheme is utterly underwhelming. It will be eligible to a mere 10,000 households per year and will cost the Commonwealth $5.5 billion, while the government retains a stake of up to 40 per cent in the homes that are purchased. This scheme is tiny compared with the 240,000 new homes required every year to fulfil the government's targeted commitment of 1.2 million homes.

The state of homeownership in this country right now is very bleak. The new National Housing Accord kicked off on 1 July 2024 with a target of 240,000 homes each year. However, in the last 12 months we have seen less than 163,000 new home building approvals across Australia. One new home needs to be built every 2.4 minutes to keep up with Labor's promise to build 1.2 million homes. The HIA is forecasting 41,910 commencements in the 2024 September quarter. These numbers are business as usual under Labor. This is unsurprising, given the state of the construction industry, left in tatters by Labor's union mates at the CFMEU.

Under Labor, housing affordability in Australia has declined to its lowest levels since reporting of records began in 1996. According to CoreLogic, a mortgage holder earning a median income will now use just under 60 per cent of their income to service a loan on a medium-value dwelling in Sydney. The only policies supporting first home buyers are the ones Labor inherited from the former coalition government.

At a time when fewer homes are being built and being approved, it's tougher to find a rental. There are record levels of migration. There were more than 520,000 migrants last year alone. This is an absolute world record in migration numbers. In the Senate economics committee inquiry into this bill, the Grattan Institute submitted:

Within living memory, all Australians had a reasonable chance to own a home. But now, for many Australians the Great Australian Dream of home ownership is becoming a nightmare.

Australians are facing an unacceptable situation where homeownership is out of reach and we have absolutely nothing from the government that meaningfully supports first homeowners. What Australians need is a comprehensive policy agenda to address supply- and demand-side hurdles that is carefully calibrated alongside state and local government and is totally focused on individual homeownership. Instead, what do we get? This pitiful opportunity to co-own a home with the Prime Minister and the Minister for Housing.

The rest of Labor's agenda on housing includes: a target of 1.2 million new homes, which even Labor's own New South Wales Premier, Chris Minns, said won't be achieved; the Housing Australia Future Fund, a thinly veiled excuse to give institutional investors and super funds a leg-up to invest in the housing market by purchasing homes for Australians to rent; and a national housing supply affordability council that has only met once since this parliament. Labor is making the housing crisis so much worse by not building enough homes, by allowing our population to grow faster than properties are being constructed and by advancing a policy approach that prioritises corporate homeownership over individual homeownership.

Under Labor, you can either own your own home with the Prime Minister and Clare O'Neill or rent from the industry super funds. This is not the Australian dream. Let's be clear: there are already shared equity products offered by state governments throughout the country. If somebody in South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria or Western Australia wants to co-own a home with the government, there are already plenty of opportunities for them to do so. In the South Australian scheme, for example, there are more places than people wanting to take them up. With all this in mind, what did Labor think to do? They thought, 'Let's bring in our own shared equity scheme,' even though there is one operating in most states in this country and even though there are available places under existing ones throughout the country. Given there are opportunities across the country to engage with shared equity schemes, it is unclear what gap this bill is seeking to address.

UNSW gave evidence to the committee that the overlap between the proposed bill and the state schemes risked adding confusing complexity for potential service providers. Help to Buy gives the government a talking point so it can be seen to be addressing the housing crisis in the country without actually doing anything. The government should be removing barriers to homeownership for young Australians, not inserting themselves into the process. Economist and housing expert Peter Tulip told the committee that the scheme was a distraction from the broader supply challenges. Economics professor John Quiggin agreed that the scheme was a very small solution to a big problem and something which has been designed on the basis of budgetary cosmetics rather than on saying, 'What is the scale of the problem and what do we need to do?'

You would think that if you were 18 months late in bringing forward legislation like this you would be looking at something that was in perfect condition and perfect order, but what have we got here? The committee inquiry revealed that no public consultation was undertaken in the drafting of this legislation. That has clearly materialised in poor targeting, bad design and poor value for taxpayers' money. Major questions remain unanswered: What is the scheme's eligibility criteria? Who is eligible to apply? What happens if you make improvements to your home? What happens if you have a $5,000 repair to the roof? Who picks up the tab for that? Well, there are no answers in this bill either. Let's assume that everything goes really well, you end up buying a home with the government, you own 60 per cent and the government owns 40 per cent. Then you receive wonderful news in your life: you are expecting a child—or you may be expecting your second or third. You need to upgrade. You need to move home. The government will then say, 'Thank you very much; we'll take our money back.' Good luck upgrading, because you've just had 40 per cent ripped out of the proceeds of your home. So you could be forced to sell, you could have the money taken off you and your opportunity to move into your next home will be next to nothing. You can understand why this is not wanted by Australians at the moment.

The additional borrowing of the Commonwealth to fund this program is $5.5 billion. We say there are infinitely better ways of spending $5.5 billion than making people enter into these very dubious arrangements that many Australians clearly don't want. Further questions that aren't answered in these bills—bills that are, as I said, 18 months late—include: Will the ATO be auditing people's incomes? If you've got an income threshold, will the ATO be auditing you each year to determine whether you're going to have the rug pulled from under you and sell your house? What are the reporting obligations? What happens if you fall behind in your mortgage repayments? Many people and families are struggling under those increasing mortgage payments, so what happens if you fall behind in your payments? Is that when the government comes along, rips the rug from underneath you and says, 'Thank you very much; it's time for you to sell and we'll take our 40 per cent back'? You'd think the answers to these questions would all be contained in these bills. You'd think the Minister for Housing would have done some work in the last 18 months and given people some answers. But we don't have these answers in these bills.

To make matters worse, the scheme's price and income caps would make it redundant on day one. The price caps set by Labor fall below the median house values in every capital in Australia with the exception of Melbourne. In Sydney, the price cap of $950,000 looks like a sick joke when considering the median house price in Sydney in April this year was $1.421 million. That's not all; the income caps for eligible participants are totally unviable. The required income to service a mortgage to cover the difference between the government stake and the overall value sits above the income caps. In practice, this means a first home buyer could never conceivably purchase a home at the government's price cap. These caps led PropTrack to estimate that Sydneysiders would be unable to purchase 96 per cent of the houses on the market using the Help to Buy scheme.

No answers, no idea. The government want us to come in here and support the bills and this scheme—a blank cheque for $5.5 billion—so they can force people to sell their homes. What lenders are participating in the scheme? We've got no idea there either. Who are the lenders? Are there going to be restrictions on who can borrow in conjunction with owning a home with the government? None of these questions are answered.

The bigger concern here is this: this is a government waving the white flag on homeownership in this country. In 20 months of Labor government we've seen nothing on first home buyers. They should see the light on the policy we took to the last election to enable first home buyers to access their superannuation to help them fund a deposit for their first home. Our policy, which we took to the last election, said, 'If you're a first home buyer, you can withdraw up to $50,000 of your own super and use that to contribute to a deposit to own your own house, and then when you sell the first home you're required to recontribute back into your super.' So your money is working for you at a time you need it most, and then when you sell your home and move to your next one you recontribute to your super so your retirement income is protected. It means you and your money are working for you. The Labor Party could never support that because the industry super funds tell Labor what to do. I say to senators opposite: you're just a vessel for the unions, and you might agree with them on a lot of things but surely there are times when they tell you to do something you don't agree with and you don't walk off the cliff with them. That's clearly what those opposite have done with this policy.

It is clear that allowing first home buyers to utilise their own super to help buy their own home and then requiring them to recontribute to it is a good policy. But this is all in the broader context in which these bills fail. We have a legacy of coalition policies that are helping first home buyers, but in almost 2.5 years we have seen absolutely nothing from this government. The entire housing market is crumbling around the new housing minister. Approvals are down, new home builds are down, first home buyers are at some of their lowest levels, rents are skyrocketing and, as for vacancy rates, trying to find a rental is extraordinarily tough. Our ability to build homes is being weakened by the day because we have insolvency after insolvency in the sector. And what do we get from this government? We get a pitiful shell of a bill with no answers to the questions in front of us. It is simply not good enough.

My final point highlights the chaotic dysfunctional nature of the housing agenda of this government. The Prime Minister went to the election promising that this scheme would open the door to homeownership for tens of thousands of Australians from 1 July 2023. But what the government didn't tell Australians was that it had no constitutional power to implement the scheme. Treasury confirmed at a committee public hearing that the scheme would operate only in states that passed legislation to refer powers to the Commonwealth and, in doing so, consent to the scheme. Treasury has provided no schedule or update on when the states will pass the required legislation. The bill, even if it does pass this parliament, is not effective until the state parliaments pass that legislation themselves.

You can't just bring in a bill 18 months late with no answers, no clarity and no certainty for Australians. For all those reasons, I reiterate that, as we said before the election, we do not support this bill. It shouldn't be called the Help to Buy Bill; it should be called the 'Force to Sell Bill', because that's what it will end up doing to Australians. We cannot in good consciousness support this bill. The scheme is a waste of taxpayers' money, and the $5.5 billion would be better employed by the Commonwealth in driving housing supply and supporting first home buyers with more effective policies.

Australians do not want to own a home with Anthony Albanese or Clare O'Neil. That is not the Australian dream. The Labor Party has given up on the Australian dream of homeownership, and Australians are paying the price.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ruston, please resume your seat. Point of order, Senator McAllister?

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've finished.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Emergency Management) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I understand Senator Ruston has indicated she has finished. I was just going to draw your attention to the standing orders that require us to use the proper titles when referring to people.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator McAllister. Thank you, Senator Ruston.

Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. Every time I rise in this place to speak about the housing and rental crisis, things have inevitably become much worse. Things have become much worse because this Labor government has failed to take the steps needed to make real change. Since the introduction of this legislation, the Greens have been clear that we are willing to negotiate with the government so we can actually help renters and first home buyers. Our door has been open, but Labor has not responded. It has not responded at all to the asks we have put on the table—the asks that will help tackle the housing crisis for millions of struggling people and families across this country.

Labor has not budged at all. There has been nothing on rent caps, no proposal on negative gearing or the capital gains tax discount, no money for a public developer—nothing. Labor's housing minister might have changed, but nothing in their policy or their position has changed in being able to tackle the housing crisis. Now, here we are, with Labor throwing a tantrum and stubbornly trying to ram through this bill, which will drive up house prices, while still refusing to scrap the massive tax handouts to wealthy property investors that are denying millions of renters the chance to buy a home.

People across the country are crying out for help as they battle with the increasing cost-of-living crisis and soaring rents and house prices. Millions of renters are struggling to keep their heads just above water, and the best Labor is willing to do is establish a housing lottery through which 0.2 per cent of renters might get access to this scheme every year. But it will drive up prices for the other 99.8 per cent of renters. The evidence to the Senate inquiry into this bill was pretty clear that the scheme will benefit a tiny minority and will have the ultimate effect of driving up house prices. In the context of already soaring house prices, mortgages and rents, to say that this is not good enough would be an understatement.

The Help to Buy scheme offers up to 10,000 people—10,000 people only—the chance to have the government purchase 30 to 40 per cent of a private home. People will be eligible only if they earn below $120,000 for a couple and below $90,000 for an individual and only if the house price is below a certain amount, depending on the city or the region. In Sydney, the house price limit in this bill is $950,000. The median house price in Sydney is over $1.6 million. There are 5.5 million adult renters in Australia and, even at capacity—and we know that schemes like this are nowhere near their capacity in New South Wales, for instance—a maximum of 10,000 renters out of 5.5 million will be able to use this scheme.

It is not just the Greens that are concerned about this bill. During the Senate inquiry, Mr Matt Grudnoff, senior economist at the Australia Institute, said this:

The Help to Buy scheme, like many previous housing affordability schemes from both major parties, is a policy to boost the financial position of a particular group , usually first home buyers. The problem with these kinds of policies is that they simply increase demand for housing, and this increases the price of housing. The result is that it makes housing less affordable.

Dr John Quiggin, professor of economics at the University of Queensland, said this:

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.

Ms Maiy Azize, spokesperson for Everybody's Home, told us this:

Scrapping negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts are not just 'nice to haves' or levers that we could pull; it is absolutely critical if we want to make housing affordable in Australia.

For over two years now, we have heard Labor say, 'Give us time; give us time,' and we're nearing the end of a full term of government, and people are really frustrated, angry and sick and tired of Labor's hollow words and false promises as they suffer and struggle every single day. Housing is a human right. In a wealthy country, it is inconceivable that so many people are experiencing homelessness and housing stress. They are one rent payment away from losing their home. They are struggling to keep a roof over their head. All this is happening while corporations are making billions of dollars in profit. The government has a duty to provide accessible, affordable, good quality housing for everyone.

Of those experiencing homelessness, 20 per cent are First Nations people, despite First Nations people making up only 3.8 per cent of the population. It should be a source of national shame that so many First Nations people are experiencing homelessness on their own land. As usual, it is those at the intersections of marginalisation and discrimination who are hit the hardest. We have a housing system that screws over millions of people while banks and property developers make an absolute killing off the misery of ordinary people. The Greens are fighting for a two-year freeze on rent increases. We are fighting for the phasing-out of unfair tax concessions, like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. And we want to invest that money into building high-quality, government built, accessible, affordable homes, sold and rented at prices people can actually afford.

This is desperately needed, because here is the situation. Rents have skyrocketed 53 per cent since 2020. Housing prices have increased 46 per cent since 2020. The shortage of public and social housing is projected to increase under this government from an already unacceptable high of 750,000 homes. Over the next 10 years, the federal government will give $176 billion in tax handouts to property investors, through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. By comparison, this Labor government has committed to zero dollars of ongoing direct spending on public housing and just $500 million a year for social housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund. That is the dire situation. I will be moving a second reading amendment to that effect later on.

According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, rents—like I said before—have increased at nearly double the rate of wages over the last year alone, putting millions of renters under significant and massive financial stress and making it impossible for many to ever save enough to buy a home in the first place. You can talk to any young person these days, and they will tell you they have completely given up their dream of owning their first home. Despite increased national wealth in GDP, homeownership rates across Australia are falling. In particular, they are falling faster amongst younger and poorer people. The housing crisis is the result of the direct failure of public policy choices. These choices have been made by successive Liberal and Labor governments. People's lives are being destroyed because of insecure housing.

The government are aware of the effects that experiencing the housing and rental crisis has on every possible measure of an individual's participation in our community, and yet they have put a scheme before parliament that equates to no more than tinkering around the edges, and I'm being generous here when I say 'tinkering around the edges'. The government has the opportunity, has had the opportunity and still has the opportunity to work with the Greens right now to start to address these systemic issues that are forcing more and more people into housing stress and homelessness.

Schemes like Help to Buy allow people to pay more for housing than they otherwise would be able to afford. As a result of these demand-side support measures—and there are other examples of these types of schemes, including the first home buyers grant and the coalition's HomeBuilder program—overall homeownership rates are lowered, as more people are priced out of housing. So, while the Help to Buy scheme might help the 0.2 per cent of people lucky to get access to the scheme, for the other 99.8 per cent it will make things worse by driving up house prices even further. Even though this is a small scheme, anything that pushes house prices up in the middle of a housing affordability crisis is a step in the wrong direction, and this is a decision that the Greens are not prepared to take.

When I'm out doorknocking on weekends, the stress that people are feeling, the betrayal that people are feeling, is palpable. They know that Labor's 'no-one left behind' mantra before the election was just an empty slogan. They know that the bad choices that Labor is making are leaving more and more people behind. And, disgracefully, Labor has now joined the Liberals in using migrants and international students as scapegoats, blaming them for their own policy failures in not addressing the housing and rental crisis. There is not much lower to sink here, and it is despicable dog whistling. Migrants and international students are feeling really attacked at this point in time, and that is a shame, and both Labor and the Liberals should be ashamed of continuing this rhetoric and this dog whistling—more and more—to win some kind of political game that they are playing, using these people as pawns in that game.

Labor should stop playing political games, because there are no winners here. There are no winners here, but there will be many losers. It is the people struggling to put food on the table. It is the people struggling to pay for the dentist. It is the people struggling under an ever-increasing HECS debt. It is the people struggling to pay the rent. These will be the losers, and there are millions and millions of them in this country.

We have up to eight months until the next federal election, so there is still time for this government to come to the table to negotiate with the Greens and to make a real, genuine difference to address the housing crisis. Labor really needs to wake up. The housing and rental crisis is breaking people, and you know that. But all you're doing is driving up rents and house prices. We can and we must do better. I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) rents have skyrocketed 53% since 2020,

(ii) housing prices have increased 46% since 2020,

(iii) the shortage of public and social housing is projected to increase under this Government from an already unacceptable high of 750,000 homes,

(iv) over the next 10 years the Federal Government will give $176 billion in tax handouts to property investors through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, and

(v) by comparison, this Labor Government has committed to zero dollars of new ongoing direct spending on public housing, and just $500 million a year for social housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) implement a phase-out of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount,

(ii) coordinate through National Cabinet the introduction of a 2-year freeze on rent increases, followed by an ongoing cap on rent increases,

(iii) establish a government developer to directly build hundreds of thousands of good quality homes over the next five years to be rented and sold for low cost, and

(iv) invest in a mass build of public housing to clear the waitlists".

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to stand here today and speak about the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the associated legislation that the Albanese Labor government is bringing forward to the parliament. We have a very firm view that it is the role of our government to help Australians with housing, particularly Australians who deserve to have their own home but who, without this bill, will not have an opportunity to do so.

I suspect that, throughout this debate and in many contributions from across the Senate chamber, we will hear about the Labor government and about politics, and we will hear many contributions from the Greens political party and the Liberal and National parties that seek to frame our government as not doing enough to help people when it comes to housing. I choose to speak about this bill and the people that it will help because, at the end of the day, this is about people. While the Greens political party, the Liberal and National parties and others in this chamber choose to use this bill to play politics with people's lives, I will talk about the people that this bill will help.

We know that this bill will assist 40,000 Australians to buy a new or existing home with a smaller deposit because they'll be backed by the government. These are Australians who want to own their home and parents who want their kids to be able to enter the housing market. We know how difficult it is to do that right now, but the Liberals and Nationals are blocking this bill here in the Senate, which is no surprise. We hear a lot of 'no' from Mr Dutton and his colleagues. But, as has been canvassed already in this debate, the Greens are also choosing to block this bill, even though it's a shared equity model, which is something they had previously supported.

I think it's important in this debate to remember what our government has done, and is doing, to support Australians when it comes to housing. We are backing a boost to rent assistance. We've expanded the Home Guarantee Scheme. We're working with National Cabinet to get a better deal on rent, and we want to add Help to Buy to this list. That's what debating this legislation this week means. We're also building a better future with a suite of policies, including our Homes for Australia Plan to build 1.2 million well-located homes over five years and the Housing Australia Future Fund.

The Liberals and Nationals want Australians to raid their retirement savings to buy property, and no Australian should have to mortgage their future to achieve homeownership today. The Greens are not serious about helping people into homes; they're only serious about using this crisis to win more votes. It is concerning to hear opposition to a bill like this from a political party that has called for action on housing for the last 2½ years.

The Greens political party are choosing to do three things in this debate. First, they're seeking to minimise the incredible and important impact that this bill will have on Australians who otherwise would not be able to afford their own home. We're talking about low-paid workers, including nurses, teachers and childcare workers. These are the people that this bill seeks to assist. But the Greens have framed them as a group of people who are not worthy of support, and that is a shame. Secondly, they're seeking to be misleading about what this bill does, so I'll step through, in my contribution, what this bill is all about and how it seeks to help people. They're doing this to justify their opposition to it. They're saying, 'The bill will do this and that and the sky will fall.' Those two things can't be true. You can't say that this bill is so small and minuscule that it will not help anyone but also that the bill would have such ramifications that the sky would fall in on housing prices. It is a ridiculous proposition, and it really shows that for them this is a debate about politics whereas, for the Labor government, it's about helping people.

The last thing that we will see from the Greens political party and others in this chamber is to make this bill and the debate about this bill about a range of other policies and other issues to claim that somehow blocking this bill will help achieve something and will eventually help build more houses. It won't, and we know that blocking this bill will block houses. That's all it will achieve: houses won't be built if this bill is blocked. The Help to Buy Bill will establish a national shared equity program that will assist low- and middle-income earners to buy new or existing homes. These are the people I'm speaking about today when I talk about who will be assisted: low-paid workers, teachers, nurses and childcare educators. The program will allow them to access an equity contribution from the Commonwealth of up to 30 to 40 per cent of the purchase price, and it'll make a home purchase feasible for up to 40,000 households. I've said this before and I'll say it again: this legislation will be life-changing for those households, for young people who could never feel that homeownership is in reach, for lower-income families who could use the scheme to upsize their family home and look after their growing family, or even for older Australians who have enough savings for a housing deposit and would no longer have to stress about paying off a mortgage before they retire.

The Help to Buy Scheme is an essential piece of the puzzle for improving our housing crisis. The legislation will also have to be passed at a state level, and I'm proud to see that my home state of Queensland is leading the way in this reform. The Queensland state government has enacted their own Help to Buy legislation so that Queenslanders can access the scheme as soon as possible. Like the Albanese Labor government, the Queensland state government is committed to helping more Queenslanders to afford their own home. Whether through Help to Buy, by doubling the first home owners grant or by increasing loan support for regional Queenslanders, they're doing what they can to make homeownership a reality for thousands more.

It should be emphasised that this Help to Buy Bill is just one commitment from our government when it comes to homeownership, renting and housing security within this country. Our government is supporting tens of thousands of new and affordable houses through our $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund—houses and homes for Australians that would have been built sooner if not for the delays we saw from the Greens. Our government is also helping nearly one million Australian households with the cost of rent by delivering $1.9 billion over five years to increase Commonwealth Rent Assistance by 10 per cent. And our government has agreed to a $9.3 billion five-year National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness.

Unlike those opposite, who have been more than happy to vote down housing legislation and did not offer a new dollar for a new home, we are taking action. We're working with the housing and construction sector and with other tiers of government to ensure that homes are built on the ground more quickly. And we're going to ensure that owning a house is a reality for more Australians.

I feel particularly strongly about this sentiment for my own community of Cairns in regional Queensland. The Australian government's Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee shows what is possible when the government supports new home owners. It's a perfect example of how these housing schemes are wanted by Australians and their changing lives. The Home Guarantee Scheme report found that 37 per cent of all first home buyer guarantees in 2022-23 were for first home buyers in regional areas. Queensland also has the highest concentration, out of all the states and territories, of regional first home guarantees, with 35 per cent issued to Queenslanders.

It's important that we recognise in this parliament that these schemes are important for all Australians but especially in regional Australia, especially for lower- and middle-income earners, and especially for young people who lack hope that owning a home could be a possibility in the future. We on this side of the chamber know that a national shared equity scheme would help level the playing field for these Australians. And we know that it's not a new scheme within our country. We've seen examples of this before, such as in Victoria, where a shared equity scheme has helped more than 7,000 Victorians to buy a home. New South Wales ran a two-year trial of a shared equity scheme as well. And we know that this bill will change the possibility of homeownership for thousands of Australians.

But unfortunately throughout this debate we will see an attempt to hold this legislation up and to prevent this bill from going through. Unfortunately, it's not about any of the homes that this bill could buy. It is about politics. It's about the Greens having an opportunity to send out more campaign emails, attend more rallies, talk more about the things that aren't being done, instead of just getting down and doing them. Only the Greens political party would rather help no-one than help tens of thousands of Australians. Only the Greens would rather delay and block life-changing legislation for over a year and argue that, somehow, they're actually helping people. We just know this isn't true. We've seen members of the Greens political party attend rallies and rant and shout about all the things that could be done. Here's an opportunity to get something done in the Senate this week.

At the start of this speech, I spoke about the people this will impact, and I want to share a small story because this is real life. We're talking about low- and middle-income earners here. We're talking about teachers, childcare educators and, yes, nurses. My mum is a nurse, and we never owned our own home. We never had the opportunity to draw on the side of a wall the height that we were growing to as the years went on. If we ever did, we'd have to paint over it. We never owned our own home. Mum's a nurse and a single mum. At one stage, we had to leave the home because of family and domestic violence. My family, the one that I grew up in, is exactly the type of family and the type of people that this bill would help. These are exactly the types of people who would be helped into homeownership by this bill. These are exactly the types of people that the Greens political party say shouldn't and can't be helped by this bill. These are exactly the types of people that those opposite are turning their backs on.

It is a real crime in this country that we cannot get this chamber to agree that a small group of people—nurses, teachers, childcare educators—deserve to have a home of their own and that their kids deserve to grow up in a home where they can draw their height as they grow from eight years old to 10 years old to 12 years old and never have to paint over it. That's what this bill is about. It's about people and families and homes to build memories in. But unfortunately today we're going to hear debate after debate about politics, particularly from the Greens political party, who absolutely should know better. There are times for campaigning, rallying, doorknocking and talking about the things that you wish you could do, but sometimes, in this chamber, there are times to just get things done. At the moment, we are in a situation where you have the Albanese Labor government who wants to build more homes in this country and you have the Greens political party prepared to block them. We are building more homes; they are prepared to block them. That's what people will remember from this week and this debate.

Thankfully, we have a government willing to take up the fight when it comes to housing affordability. We've got proposals on the table and an ambitious plan to build more houses all across Australia. I've stepped foot in the houses that our regional homebuyers grants have built. I look forward to seeing more houses built in regional Australia. We are getting on with the job of building houses for Australians. It's something that we committed to when we came to government. I really hope that the Senate looks at this bill, takes the opportunity to work together, instead of working against Australians and blocking housing, and gives this government the opportunity to build more houses and to help more people into houses of their own for their families, for their kids and for the memories that they'll build together over many years to come.

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

If the Labor Party want any advice on why the Australian people are losing confidence in their political party, they need to look no further than housing. It was 870 days ago that the Prime Minister announced the Help to Buy scheme at the Labor Party's campaign launch. And here we are, at the back end of this parliamentary term, with the government now seeking to legislate Help to Buy after having presided over a massive failure on housing. We are seeing fewer houses built, and we are seeing fewer Australians getting into the market for the first time. The number of first home buyers in Australia is down over the last few years of the Labor Party being in office, and that is a huge regret for our nation.

In terms of affordability—that is, the nexus between how much money you earn and how much you pay for your mortgage—we are looking at 60 per cent of people being under very serious mortgage stress in Australia. Since the election in May 2022, there has been a massive influx of people into Australia. We have always welcomed migrants in this country, but there's always been an agreement, generally speaking, that the people you bring into the country need to be housed. What we've seen is over a million people coming into the country but only a couple of hundred thousand houses being built. If you go back just eight years, we were building 230,000 houses in this country. Now, under this government, we're only building 160,000 houses, so we are going backwards. You don't need to be Einstein to work this out: if you build fewer houses, you make the problem worse. This is a massive supply problem. We need to be building over 250,000 houses a year to arrest this major problem, and what we're seeing is Labor building only 160,000 houses.

Labor has had two major supply policies. The Housing Australia Future Fund, which is a massive boondoggle fund, spends millions of dollars on administration and paying the CEO a big salary, but it builds no houses. Housing Australia now has former Labor members of parliament on its board. It has the back door open to the CFMEU. The CFMEU's favourite super funds—First Super, Cbus, and the other one—can go in and access taxpayer funds through the Housing Australia Future Fund. That is also partly linked to the housing targets. So the government say they've got a housing target. They want to build 1.2 million houses over the next five years, but their own adviser, the Housing Affordability and Supply Council, says that will never happen. All the independent economists say the government has no chance of ever meeting its supply target of 1.2 million houses. You've seen the government put in place a boondoggle fund that builds no houses, and they have housing targets that they will never, ever, ever meet. It's a huge failure on supply.

Then we get to demand. How will the government help first home buyers on the demand side? How will the government tilt the scales in favour of first home buyers? They have one answer: Help to Buy. Announced 870 days ago, it's a puny scheme that will help 10,000 people. When we need to be building 250,000 houses, they have a solution for 10,000 people. That's it. The cupboard is bare. They have one idea: Help to Buy, announced 870 days ago. So what on earth has this government been doing over the past 2½ years? Not very much. They seem to be very boxed in with their ideological problems. The Help to Buy scheme is culturally jarring in this country because the Australian people don't want to co-own their house with the government. The Australian dream is about people owning houses; it is not about the government co-owning their house. I'm not sure that Mr Albanese is such a good landlord anyway; we read in the papers that he hasn't been so good to his tenants. So the Australian people do not want to co-own their house with Mr Albanese. Peter Tulip, the economist from the CIS, said this is a distraction. John Piggott, another economist, said it's not to scale.

This scheme with 10,000 places is a pimple on the elephant's backside when you consider the scale of the problem here. We need to be building 240,000 houses a year. This scheme would cost $5.5 billion, and one of the most serious problems with the design features we found in the Economics Legislation Committee inquiry was that the caps are far too low. The median house price in Sydney is $1.4 million, and the Help to Buy cap is $900,000; in Brisbane, the median house price is $920,000, and the Help to Buy cap is $700,000; and here in Canberra the median house price is $970,000, and the Help to Buy cap is $750,000. So this is a hopeless scheme. The scheme caps are way too low for the median house price, so I'm not sure who it's designed for.

But the most troubling part of it is that this is their only idea. They have no other ideas on demand. They have no other ideas on how to help first home buyers. They're too afraid to look at superannuation, which is the biggest pool of capital the average worker has today. Unless you are lucky enough to have access to the bank of mum and dad—which is now the sixth-biggest lender in Australia—super is likely to be your only hope if you are an average worker. But Labor say, 'No, we can't let you use your own money.' In fact, they say you'll be raiding your own money if you use your own money to get into the first-home market. The key fact, though, is that the key determinant for success in retirement is not your superannuation balance; it is your homeownership status. Labor is closing the door on the most practical, useable solution for first home buyers.

The other thing you never hear from Labor is anything about lending, mortgages and banking policy. One thing the Commonwealth government has in its preserve is banking policy, under the corporations power. They never talk about how hard it is to get a mortgage and how high the regulatory burden is on people trying to get that elusive first mortgage; they never talk about that. They only have one idea: Help to Buy, a discredited scheme, run by almost all the states and territories—and it's always undersubscribed; no-one wants to use this scheme. In fact, the Victorians are closing theirs down.

Just to give you another insight into the maladministration here in Canberra, only one state, Queensland, has referred its powers under the Constitution, which is necessary to give effect to this scheme. We just heard Senator Green talk about that. Only one state has made the necessary referral. So the idea that these are urgent bills, after 870 days, is an absolute joke. The new housing minister has the same problem as the old housing minister: the policies are completely cooked. No wonder young people are going crazy about housing, because housing in Australia is getting so much worse under this government. There are fewer first home buyers, there are fewer houses being built and the government has one callous scheme—Help to Buy, which it knows won't touch the sides in every major capital city except for Melbourne.

The idea that we've got to rush in here today, debate these bills and pass these bills in the next few days is a cruel hoax. Help to Buy will help very few Australians. This is a massive problem requiring a serious solution from a serious government. Australia does not have that at the moment, and that's why it's urgent that we get on and have the election so we can get rid of this terrible government and get the Australian dream back on track.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's deeply concerning to see housing affordability being politicised the way the climate debate has been. We know that all that happened was a delay to the actions we so desperately needed. I'm really concerned that we're now seeing the same thing here on housing. I agree that we need to see much more ambition from government—so much more ambition—starting with doubling the size of the Housing Australia Future Fund, from which we saw the first round of announcements of projects today. There is capacity in the sector to build more social and affordable housing faster, and the federal government can and should support them to do that.

We also need to start to address some of the root causes of the housing affordability crisis, which means that we must have a conversation about tax reform. We can't have a situation where young people can't afford housing while at the same time taxpayers are subsidising people in foregone tax concessions for their fourth, fifth or sixth investment property to the tune of $20 billion a year within the decade. We need to raise that revenue and direct it to more public and social housing. Only one per cent of Australian taxpayers own nearly a quarter of all property investments across the country. How can we talk about the egalitarian dream of Australia and allow that to happen, where one per cent of taxpayers own 25 per cent of the property and we have a whole generation of Australians locked out of homeownership?

Our housing crisis is feeding growing intergenerational inequality, and we have to turn that around. I hear so much from Canberrans who don't like what's happening. They see the intergenerational inequality, and they want politicians, decision-makers, to start turning the ship around. But that obviously means compromising, being constructive and actually making some changes. We know there are no silver bullets. That's magical thinking—to think that when it comes to housing there's a silver bullet that will change it all. We are in a very, very deep hole when it comes to this housing crisis, and it's going to take a lot to get us out of it. But I'm worried that politics is standing in the way of delivering measures that, while not perfect and certainly not the whole solution, can and will help.

I back the intent of this bill because it will help people who don't have wealthy parents get into housing. We live in a country now where the bank of mum and dad is one of the biggest lenders, and, if you don't have wealthy parents, you're basically stuffed. We can't allow that to happen. We need to start putting measures in place now and also dealing with some of the root causes of the crisis that we're in. This bill will help older women—the cohort most at risk of homelessness—purchase a home on their own, and the same for single parents. While technically a demand-side measure when what we need is more supply, this bill will help some of the most vulnerable people in our community get into homeownership.

Economists and experts are united in saying the impact of the bill on house prices will be negligible. That was pretty clear at the hearing. But the bill can be better, and I'll be moving a number of amendments, co-sponsored by crossbench colleagues, to do that. Firstly, I want to see the scheme expanded to 30,000 places per annum, with at least one-third of these places going to older women or First Nations people. Homeownership rates amongst First Nations people are below the national average. We know housing is an enabler of other social benefits. Access to safe, secure and affordable housing helps deliver better health, educational and economic outcomes.

This scheme should also extend beyond the forward estimates. Four years is not long enough to fix the housing crisis. If the government believes in this scheme, this scheme should operate for longer. I also want to see the object of the bill amended to sharpen the focus of what this bill seeks to do, by explicitly acknowledging the need to focus on housing outcomes for historically disadvantaged Australians, again including older women and First Nations people.

I'll also be moving an amendment to sharpen the focus of the review so that it explicitly examines how effective the scheme has been in supporting people to accelerate their access to homeownership—people who would otherwise be permanently excluded from homeownership. It's also imperative that this review considers how effectively the scheme is integrating with other first home buyer assistance programs that have been mentioned by various senators in this debate. I know, for example, that here in the ACT the property price caps are excluding more and more people from accessing assistance under the scheme. And I urge the government to actually negotiate on this. We hear publicly that you're open to negotiating, but in private it's flagged that there can be no amendments to this bill. That doesn't sound like negotiation to me. This bill will help more of those people into homeownership, and I urge my Senate colleagues to give this bill consideration and work constructively.

Senator Bragg rightly says that this won't solve things. We all know it won't. But his party won't entertain dealing with the root causes of the housing crisis either. They won't touch the capital gains tax discount or even talk about limiting negative gearing—finding a way forward. Their solution is for young people to use their superannuation. So we're going to have a whole generation of young people who have to choose between superannuation and that compounding over their working life, or getting into the housing market. Why should it be an either/or for young Australians? Why can't we actually deal with some of the root causes of this?

Yes, we have to have a debate about immigration. This is putting pressure on people already living here, and new migrants. It's incredibly unfair to arrive into a housing crisis. We have to be able to talk about this and, as Australians, decide how big we want Australia to get. We need to talk about the effect that's having on house prices and look at ideas put forward by people like Alan Kohler, who suggests that we should cap migration and double the completed dwellings every year to ensure that we are keeping up on the supply side.

Last week, the Parliamentary Friends of Affordable Housing and Reducing Homelessness, which I co-chair with Josh Burns and Angie Bell in the other place, hosted Maiy Azize and Everybody's Home for the launch of Voices of the crisis: final report from thepeople's commission into Australia's housing crisis. Hon. Doug Cameron and Professor Nicole Gurran did a huge amount of work in getting people together to consult and cooperate. I want to touch on some of the recommendations in the report, in a place where I feel like we hardly ever get to the root cause of these problems. We've got this big balloon in front of us, and we're just seeing little patches being put on whenever there's a leak.

The report makes eight recommendations. No. 1 is to invest in a broad-based social housing program. Who doesn't want to see the government invest in more social housing? Here in the ACT we have the highest rate of persistent homelessness in the country, under a Labor-Greens government. We've seen social housing sold off, not replaced. As a Canberran, I find it deeply embarrassing. I actually feel ashamed, looking at our rates of homelessness. On our social housing list, we have 3,100 people waiting for access to social housing. We need the federal government to step up and work with the states and territories and ensure that they make good on their commitments when it comes to social and affordable housing.

No. 2 is to recognise housing as a human right. This seems pretty commonsense to me. Is housing a human right, something that we should ensure that everyone in our community has access to, or is it an investment vehicle? When I talk to Canberrans, everyone says, 'Of course it's the first thing.' This is so fundamental to human health and being able to flourish. In fact, I have a bill before the Senate that would seek to enshrine housing as a human right, and I thank Kylea Tink, in the other place, who has introduced the same bill. No. 3 is to ensure housing assistance meets people's needs. We've heard the government talk about the huge increase in Commonwealth rent assistance, but we know that it is still nowhere near enough. At the same time as we talk about these new schemes that the government is putting forward, we can't forget that the NRAS, the National Rental Affordability Scheme, is winding up, and we're seeing thousands of affordable rentals exit the market.

No. 4 is to coordinate national rental reforms that limit unfair rent increases, end no-cause evictions and enact minimum standards. Again, this is something that Australians want in the Treasury Laws Amendment (Build to Rent) Bill, which I assume we'll be debating at some point this week. We've seen a really commonsense proposal from the Community Housing Industry Association, National Shelter and the Property Council. They don't often see eye to eye, but they've worked together to ensure that there are more affordable rentals in the build-to-rent package. Part of that work is adding some conditionality to Commonwealth money, requiring five-year minimum lease agreements and banning all no-cause evictions. It's an opportunity for the Greens and for us, for the first time, to have conditionality on those sorts of tax concessions to ensure that renters have a better deal.

No. 5 is one that, again, the major parties don't want to talk about: abolish the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing for property investors. There are ideas around incrementally reducing the capital gains tax discount on investment properties over the next ten years, phasing out negative gearing, abolishing incentives to downsize the family home, using the revenue savings for investment and supply of well-designed public and community housing that is affordable. We have to be able to actually turn this ship around, and it doesn't have to be an either/or. There are ways to start to address this. Senator Jacqui Lambie and I had a range of options costed by the PBO. There are options out there if the major parties are willing to entertain them. No. 6 is to support affordable homes and sustainable, inclusive communities. No. 7 is First Nations housing justice, which I touched on earlier. No. 8 is enshrining people's voices within a policy framework that is fit for purpose.

There are solutions out there if we are willing to listen to the communities that we come in here to represent, if we're willing to listen to the experts, but that's going to take some political courage. Again, all of these proposals and schemes have their place, but we all know they're not going to solve things, so let's actually get on with this. It's a small thing for people who don't have wealthy parents and who want to get into the market, but let's turn our minds to addressing some of the root causes of this housing crisis.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The housing crisis we find ourselves in at the moment is one of a number of areas of public policy where Labor has had to step in after almost a decade of inaction by the previous government. The devastating consequences of this are easy to see. In my home city of Hobart, we see increasing numbers of people sleeping in cars and caravans. There are tents pitched in public parks throughout the city, and, even in my own suburb, which is a beautiful seaside suburb, there are tents pitched down by the river. People sleeping rough is just the tip of the iceberg. Our homelessness problem includes people sleeping in emergency accommodation or couch surfing. Many homeless people are lucky enough to have a roof over their heads, but they lack the certainty and stability of permanent accommodation.

The social housing waiting list in my home state of Tasmania is now at over 4,700 individuals and families, and the average time for priority applicants—and by this I mean people in the most desperate circumstances—is more than 90 weeks. What we do not see in our homelessness figures is the number of people who are in rental or mortgage stress, those who have permanent accommodation but face the uncertainty of whether they can hold on to it while they struggle to afford the other basics of living. This, as I said, is the legacy of almost a decade of the previous government sitting on their hands while housing affordability got further and further out of reach for so many Australians. Like so many messes left by the previous government through mismanagement and neglect, it has once again fallen to Labor to clean up the mess, and, like so many messes left by the previous government, addressing the legacy of almost a decade of neglect can take a long time.

We brought to the election a comprehensive suite of measures that would increase the supply of affordable housing and help more Australians realise the security of a roof over their head. We have continued to add measures, including $6.2 billion in new investment in the 2024 federal budget. The latest measures bring the Albanese government's new housing initiative to $32 billion. Our Homes for Australia Plan will help meet Australia's ambitious goal of building 1.2 million new homes between 1 July 2024 and 1 July 2029.

In addition to building new homes, our plan is also about providing relief for renters and helping Australians own their own homes. The $6.2 billion in new investment in the budget will turbocharge construction, with a $1 billion boost for states and territories to build the roads, sewers and more energy, water and community infrastructure that we need for new homes and additional social housing. It will train more tradies to build the homes Australia needs, with 20,000 fee-free TAFE and pre-apprenticeship places for the housing and construction industry. It will help nearly one million Australian households with the cost of rent by delivering $1.9 billion for the first back-to-back increase to Commonwealth rent assistance in more than 30 years.

It will provide up to $1.9 billion in concessional finance for community housing providers and other charities to support delivery of the 40,000 social and affordable homes under the Housing Australia Future Fund and National Housing Accord. It will deliver additional funding for the new $9.3 billion National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness, which began on 1 July. This includes a doubling of Commonwealth homelessness funding to $400 million every year, matched by the states and territories. It will improve conditions and address overcrowding through an additional $842.8 million investment in remote housing in the Northern Territory.

The budget package also includes working with the higher education sector on new regulations to require universities to increase student accommodation, taking pressure off the rental market; increasing the government's line of credit to Housing Australia by $3 billion and Housing Australia's liability cap by $2.5 billion; and directing $1 billion under the National Housing Infrastructure Facility towards crisis and transitional accommodation for women and children experiencing domestic violence, and youth. This includes increasing the proportion of grants for this investment from $175 million to $700 million to be able to support crisis and transitional housing.

We announced recently that the first $500 million disbursement from the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund will deliver more than 13,700 social and affordable homes, and these include 1,267 homes for women and children escaping family and domestic violence, and older women at risk of homelessness. In just the first round of the Housing Australia Future Fund, the Albanese government is directly supporting more social and affordable homes than the coalition did in their entire decade in office—in the entire decade that they were in office.

The Housing Australia Future Fund and all the other measures I just outlined are about helping Australians to build, rent and buy, and this bill is focused on the last of those three activities. There are many benefits to getting more Australians into homeownership. It gives more Australians the safety, security and dignity of a permanent roof over their heads. It gives Australians more economic freedom, and it helps more Australians gain a foothold in the property capital market.

Unfortunately, over a number of decades the great Australian dream of homeownership has become less and less accessible for low- and middle-income Australians. Forty years ago, almost 60 per cent of young Australians on low and modest incomes owned their own home. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 28 per cent. Twenty-five years ago, average houses cost nine times the average household income. Today it is 16½ times. Renters desperately trying to save for a house deposit are facing a double whammy as a result of rising house prices. Not only do they have to save twice as much for a deposit but increasing rents make that task even more challenging by eating into those potential savings. That is why shared-equity schemes such as the one proposed by this bill are so important to getting more Australians into the housing market.

But, when it comes to helping more Australians to own their own home, Help to Buy is not the only measure we are adopting. The government has already helped more than 100,000 people throughout Australia into homeownership through the Home Guarantee Scheme, including through the new Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee. The Home Guarantee Scheme has also been significantly expanded, making it easier for Australians to buy a home.

Over four years, the Help to Buy scheme will help 40,000 low- and middle-income Australians buy their own home. This is a shared-equity scheme in which only a two per cent deposit is required and which will cut the cost of a mortgage by up to 40 per cent and up to $380,000. As such, Help to Buy helps new homeowners to overcome two hurdles: the hurdle of saving for a deposit and the hurdle of servicing the mortgage. Through Help to Buy, the Australian government will be an equity partner alongside the homeowner. As with state and territory shared-equity schemes, the homebuyer will have the option of buying more equity in the property, if and when they can afford it, and will have the potential to own their home outright. When the property is sold or refinanced, the government as an equity partner will recoup its equity investment plus a share of capital gains.

We are seeing shared-equity schemes work successfully in the states and territories, but this will be the first national scheme of its kind. All states have agreed at National Cabinet to progress legislation so that the scheme can run nationally. But we can see from the debate leading up to this bill and from the dissenting reports of the inquiry that we're going to see a repeat of all the antics that delayed the Housing Australia Future Fund. Once again, the unholy alliance of the Greens and the coalition will join forces to delay action on affordable housing. They've already voted to delay action by more than six months by referring this bill to an unnecessary inquiry. The bill could have been in place late last year and could have already helped thousands of Australians into homeownership by now.

As I've said before in relation to the Housing Australia Future Fund, it's little surprise that the coalition will vote to delay actions on affordable housing. Australians know that they do not care about housing affordability. That much is clear, as I've said, from their almost decade of inaction while in government. The Greens, on the other hand, pretend to care, yet, every time the government seeks to deliver on our election promise, they team up with Mr Dutton and his conservative opposition and apply the brakes. We saw these kinds of tactics in relation to the HAFF, where the Greens delayed and delayed and, in doing so, claimed credit for every Labor housing announcement as if they had extracted some kind of concession from the government. During the delaying of the HAFF, I had a number of former Greens voters speak to me or contact my office to say how angry they were that the Greens were delaying action on affordable housing. And, while the Greens would like to claim that they extracted further investment from us, the truth is this: yes, we announced further funding for our Homes for Australia plan while the HAFF was being delayed, but we also announced significant further funding for our Homes for Australia plan after the HAFF passed the Senate.

So I'll go back to what I said earlier in this speech about $6 billion in additional funding announced in this year's budget. The truth is that we delivered what we would have delivered anyway. The only effect of the Greens' delaying tactic was to make thousands of Australians wait longer for investment in affordable housing. I strongly suspect that the Greens' pretence of caring about Australians struggling to afford their own home is for political, rather than moral, motives. The member for Griffith in the other place, the Greens' spokesperson on housing, made their motives quite clear, in fact, in an article he wrote that was published in February 2023. In this article, Mr Chandler-Mather said:

Allowing the HAFF to pass would demobilize the growing section of civil society that is justifiably angry about the degree of poverty and financial stress that exists in such a wealthy country.

'Demobilise': that's what it's about. In the same article, Mr Chandler-Mather revealed that the Greens had launched a doorknocking campaign that was targeted at Labor-held federal electorates.

To be clear, what the Greens political party were doing with the HAFF and are repeating now with the Help to Buy scheme is to delay implementation for political advantage. How crass can you be? It's the height of irony that, while the Greens claim to be fighting on behalf of homeless Australians and people in housing stress, it's their actions that are getting in the way of helping the very people they claim to be fighting for. For the Greens political party to delay action on affordable housing for political gain is unconscionable, and they should hang their heads in shame. The consequence of delaying this legislation is that 40,000 Australians will take longer to realise the dream of owning their own home. The Greens political party profess to care about giving Australians a roof over their heads, but what do they have to contribute when it comes to actually delivering on affordable housing? Just grandstanding. They follow their grandstanding with criticism, then they follow criticism with delay after delay after delay.

The Greens also continue to push their misguided policy of a rent freeze. This is a measure that's been roundly rejected by experts, and I remind the Greens again, as I have before in this place, what some of those experts have said. The Grattan Institute said a rent freeze would 'blunt the incentive to build more housing, leaving us with fewer, poorer quality dwellings'. The Centre for Equitable Housing, in their report on regulation of rents, stated:

… a "rent freeze", would be a poor response to the real challenges facing Australia's housing system, almost certainly making the problem worse for those in real housing stress.

So I remind the Greens that these are not the words of property investors or people with a financial interest in extracting more from renters; these are not-for-profit organisations that are dedicated to evidence based housing affordability solutions. I also remind the Greens that both these organisations go on to say that the best way to improve housing affordability is to develop more affordable housing stock—exactly the kind of action the Greens have delayed for months and months in this place.

It's time for the coalition and the Greens to get out of the way and allow Labor to get on with delivering our election commitment of helping thousands more Australians realise the dream of owning their home. I commend this bill to the Senate.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Help to Buy Bill 2023. The proposed Help to Buy Scheme is a reckless housing lottery bill that will ultimately increase house prices. In its current form, the Help to Buy Scheme will see the housing crisis get worse. The government will not fix the housing crisis by pushing up house prices, as this bill would do, making it harder for 99.8 per cent of renters every year to buy a home. The government will not fix the housing crisis by giving a lucky few—very few—more cash to bid up the price of housing at auctions. The government will not fix the housing crisis without touching negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount—those massive tax handouts for property investors that deny millions of renters the chance to buy a home.

In effect, this Help to Buy Scheme will establish a terrible housing lottery where a maximum of 0.2 per cent of renters would get access to the scheme every year while the other 99.8 per cent would find it even harder to buy a home. Now, it isn't just the Greens contending this. Successive economists and housing experts during the course of the Senate inquiry into this bill made it clear that this bill would push up house prices and would in fact make the housing crisis worse.

Alarmingly, the federal Treasury acknowledged that they hadn't actually modelled the impact that the Help to Buy Scheme would have on house prices, and the Help to Buy bills themselves lack basic detail on eligibility and other basic key questions on the operation of the scheme. Schemes like Help to Buy allow people to pay more for housing than they otherwise would be able to afford. This ultimately prices people out of housing. The evidence during the Senate inquiry into the bill was clear. This scheme would benefit only a tiny fraction of potential first home owners while increasing house prices for everyone not lucky enough to win Labor's housing lottery through increased demand.

Even though this is a small scheme, anything that pushes prices up in the middle of a housing affordability crisis is a step in the wrong direction. Last month my home state of Queensland earned the unenviable title of the homelessness capital of Australia. But it's not just my home state. Millions of people are struggling to pay rent or struggling to pay their mortgages, and they're giving up on ever being able to afford to buy a home. No-one in the 10 most common professions across the country can afford to buy a house and avoid housing stress in some figures that we released recently off the back of PBO costing. This is the devastating reality. Homeownership is completely unattainable for most of the country's essential professions. And how can you save for a deposit when you're stuck paying skyrocketing rents? Meanwhile, the Albanese government has put forward this bill that will push up house prices and help almost no-one.

From the moment the bill was introduced, the Greens have been willing to pass the bill if the government negotiated with us on negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Those tax handouts collectively push up the price of housing, which disadvantages renters at auctions. As multiple experts during the inquiry into this bill said, the reality is that we will never tackle the housing crisis until we phase out negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Maiy Azize, who's the spokesperson for Everybody's Home, said:

Scrapping negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts are not just 'nice to haves' or levers that we could pull, it is absolutely critical if we want to make housing affordable in Australia.

Dr John Quiggin, an economist from my home state of Queensland, where he's a professor of economics at UQ, 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.

Mr Matt Grudnoff, who's a senior economist at the Australia Institute, said:

The Help to Buy scheme, like many previous housing affordability schemes from both major parties, is a policy to boost the financial position of a particular group, usually first home buyers. The problem with these kinds of policies is that they simply increase demand for housing, and this increases the price of housing. The result is that it makes housing less affordable.

Dr Peter Tulip, from the Centre of International Studies, said:

When you stimulate demand, it puts up prices and makes housing more expensive for everybody else.

He said:

We have a housing affordability crisis, and this makes that problem worse for the majority of people entering the market.

That's a pretty clear sentiment being expressed there.

With the money saved from phasing out big tax handouts for property investors, we could fully fund the Greens plan to establish a public property developer to build 610,000 good-quality homes to be sold and rented at below market prices. The majority of the public now support capping rents, scrapping tax handouts for property investors and establishing a public developer to build, sell and rent homes at below market prices, so why does Labor keep siding with property investors instead? Labor will give property investors $176 billion in tax handouts over the next 10 years, while millions of renters and mortgage holders suffer. If the government really wanted to tackle the housing crisis, they would listen to the majority of Australians' calls and directly build homes.

The bottom line is this. There are five million renters in this country, and there are millions more people—including parents of those renters—right now who know that this country is unfair and it's stacked against them, and they're sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens. Come the next election, I think this government is going to be in for a rude shock when it realises it can no longer keep putting the interests of property developers, property moguls and banks ahead of renters, first home buyers and mortgage holders.

The Greens will keep fighting for solutions that will tackle the housing crisis. We'll keep calling for a two-year rent freeze and winding back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions for property investors because those concessions are denying millions of renters the chance to buy a home. We'll keep calling for the government to reinvest that money in government built homes, sold and rented at prices that people can actually afford. We remain ready to negotiate a housing plan that actually helps the millions of teachers, nurses and early childhood workers who just want an affordable home. We want to negotiate something that will actually help people. But the government is refusing to engage. They are stonewalling us. This is tragic because we are in a terrible housing and rental crisis. It is a crisis of affordability, and it's the direct result of the failure of public policy choices made by successive Labor and Liberal governments.

The stakes of this housing crisis could not be higher. The latest annual Productivity Commission Report on government services shows that there were 57,519 unassisted requests for accommodation from homelessness services last year. Moreover, there are currently over 170,000 households that are on the waiting list for public housing. People's lives are being destroyed because of insecure housing. The government are aware of the effects that experiencing the housing and rental crisis have on every possible measure of an individual's participation in our community, and yet they put a scheme forward that equates to no more than tinkering around the edges—a scheme that would also put upward pressure on housing prices.

The Greens want to see the government treat the crisis seriously, and that requires large-scale responses. In particular, we would like to see the government use their vast resources and administrative capacity to directly build homes to rent and sell at below-market prices. We'd like to see the federal government offer the state and territory governments incentives to implement an emergency freeze on rent increases. That could be achieved using a mechanism similar to that outlined in the Help to Buy Bill, which refers powers to the Commonwealth. We'd like to see the government phase out unfair tax handouts, such as negative gearing and capital gains tax, which have significantly inflated the price of housing, denying millions of renters the chance to buy a home. The solutions to the housing crisis require far more than just tinkering around the edges through schemes like Help to Buy. The Greens believe that responding to the housing crisis requires structural change—in particular, phasing out those tax handouts to property investors that encourage property speculation and drive up the cost of housing.

Throughout the Senate Economics Legislation Committee inquiry into this bill, that view was made clear over and over again, along with the need for the government to build far more public housing. Professor Quiggin, who I referred to before, explained that Help to Buy allows the government to appear like they're responding to the housing crisis without spending the money required to do so. In comparing the Help to Buy scheme and the Housing Australia Future Fund, he said:

… there was an attempt to deliver the desired outcome while pretending that there was no impact on the budget. The fact is that housing is a major capital investment. If the government wants to have more housing, ultimately the only way to do that is programs which would involve a substantial amount of public debt and a substantial amount of real investment. So I think what we're seeing is another piece of gesture politics.

When asked what policies the government should pursue to respond to the crisis of housing affordability and to ensure that more renters could afford to purchase a home, Mr Grudnoff, who I also referred to earlier, said:

… the most effective policy for housing affordability that the federal government could pursue is to limit negative gearing and scrap the capital gains tax discount. This would discourage property speculators and reduce the demand for housing. It would mean less housing being sold for renting and more housing being sold for owner occupiers. It would increase homeownership rates. This would also raise more than $10 billion per year, which could be used either to build more public housing or for other uses.

That call was echoed by Maiy Azize from Everybody's Home, as I referred to earlier. She said that the reforms are essential to responding to the housing crisis. She said:

Scrapping negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts are not just 'nice to haves' or levers that we could pull, it is absolutely critical if we want to make housing affordable in Australia.

She went on to explain how both the Labor and the Liberal federal governments have created the housing crisis—in particular, through their decisions to implement or to maintain negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount and to underfund public housing. She said:

… the two things that the federal government has done in the past couple of decades to create the crisis that we're in is, firstly, to pull back from supplying housing itself, which it used to do at a much greater scale. About one in three renters actually used to have the government as a landlord and about one in four new builds used to be built by the government. That was key to driving affordability, not just for people on low incomes but across the board. In the decade since, what we've seen is that all the policy levers and investment and incentives have been completely directed at the private sector, which has massively financialised and commodified housing and made it really difficult for house prices to ever come down.

The benefits of tax handouts for property investors are going to the wealthiest in our community, who don't need the help from the public purse. The 2023-24 tax expenditures and insights statement outlined that 82 per cent of the benefit of the capital gains tax discount was received by the top income decile. At the hearing into this bill, Kristin O'Connell, spokesperson for the Antipoverty Centre, said:

It's quite sickening to be a welfare recipient and have the government consistently tell us that they can't afford to give us enough money to live or to invest in public housing and also see hundreds of billions of dollars being handed out to people who are already wealthy.

Ms O'Connell and Emma Greenhalgh, the CEO of National Shelter, also called for stronger protections for renters from unlimited rental increases. Stronger protections against rental increases would help all potential first home buyers and, unlike Help to Buy, would not push homeownership further out of the reach of the majority.

In conclusion, Help to Buy as it's currently proposed fails to address the underlying causes of the housing affordability crisis in Australia. It aims to assist a small fraction of potential homeowners, and its limited scope and demand side approach are likely to exacerbate the housing crisis without offering any of the solutions that the government knows would work, as they did in the 20th century. This is a deeply unambitious policy introduced at a critical point where homelessness and rental and mortgage stress are skyrocketing. The government has the opportunity to work with the Greens and the crossbench right now to start to address these systemic issues that are forcing more people into housing stress and homelessness. Tinkering around the edges will not help the vast majority of people. The scheme's impact on house prices, although minimal in the broader context of the national housing market, represents a misguided allocation of resources that could otherwise be directed towards more effective solutions to this crisis. Please work with us to get good outcomes for people, rather than trying to force these bills on for a vote when you know they won't pass. (Time expired)

Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to make a contribution on the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. Here we are again, in this chamber, in the Senate, at an impasse on housing—how absurd. It is absurd we are standing here again with a plan on the table which will make an impact on young people's future and which will make an impact on housing, and yet again we are at an impasse.

This is the biggest issue facing so many Australians but especially young Australians in this country. It is my generation and those younger than us who feel locked out and let down by what is happening in housing in this country, and they are right to feel it. And when they look at debates in our chamber there is no hope for them because there are these constant impasses driven by the coalition on one side, who see political gain in not enough happening here. They're not interested or vested in a positive outcome. They're vested in a political outcome; you can see that in the way they engage in these debates and you can see it in the way they continually show up to this chamber without a better plan on the table, without constructive engagement with the government. On housing, they come into this chamber time after time with one word on their lips: 'no'. They are only doing that because they have an interest in this not working. They should be fronting up instead, working with the government and supporting plans which will make an impact on housing in this country.

Earlier in this debate the coalition were lamenting the fact there aren't enough houses being built in Australia. How many housing plans have they come in here and voted for? What have they done to work constructively with the government to get more houses built in Australia, to drive that investment we know needs to happen not just in social and affordable housing but through the private sector? They have no credibility on this because they never come to these debates and constructively engage to get outcomes on housing to solve this challenge, which sits in the pit of the stomachs of so many young Australians who feel locked out and let down. They're not helped by the Greens, who are also part of this impasse and are more interested in chasing social media engagement than social impact, more interested in chasing clicks than outcomes. They could walk into this chamber, too, and engage constructively. They could engage constructively rather than delay and delay, and block and block.

So, yes; young Australians feel locked out and let down. I pity any watching the debate in the Senate today, where there's another plan on the table which would make a difference on this issue—this issue which weighs so heavily on their hearts, their minds and their concerns for their future. Instead of constructive engagement, they see the Senate at an impasse again. They see a plan on the table, they see those opposite saying no and they see those to my side quickly drafting up memes on social media—they're doing the work there!—but not being interested in outcomes, the impact and the change which will make a difference in people's lives.

Let's be clear on what this bill does. It's a national shared-equity scheme designed to help more Australians into homeownership, where homeowners can purchase property with just a two per cent deposit. The government will also support eligible homebuyers with an equity contribution—up to 40 per cent for new homes and 30 per cent for existing homes. It will support up to 40,000 low- and middle-income Australians to save hundreds every month on their mortgage. It's a good bill. It's a bill that will make a difference. It is not the whole answer to everything happening in the housing market. It is not the answer to every challenge before us. But it is an answer. It is one pathway. It is one thing that will make a difference. But, like every other bill we've brought to this place and every other plan we've brought to this place, it will be subjected to meme after meme after meme and click after click after click, and we will hear, 'No, no, no, no,' from those opposite, who just aren't interested in engaging.

We've seen the Liberals and the Greens vote against these bills in the other place. It's no surprise from the coalition; it's no to everything. That's their political strategy; that's their game plan at the moment. But what about the Greens voting against it? Their election platform called for a shared-equity model, which is what this is, and they're standing in the way of more help for those who want to enter the housing market. They're standing in the way of the ambition and aspiration of young Australians who want to enter the housing market. Let's not skip over the fact that those opposite—the Liberals and the National Party—had a decade in government to address some of the supply issues that we are dealing with in the housing market. They had a decade. This isn't a problem that comes up overnight. They did nothing to boost supply, yet they come in here now, when plan after plan has been put on the table by our government—a government which actually wants to do something and which actually wants to change something—and they say no. Time after time after time, they say no.

I heard my friend Senator Bragg lamenting earlier in this debate that the policy cupboard of the government is bare. Well, what's in your cupboard, Senator Bragg? What's in the cupboard for the Liberals and Nationals is raiding the superannuation of young Australians. What's in their cupboard is making young Australians choose between their aspiration for homeownership and having decent superannuation and a decent retirement. It's about limiting their ambitions. Well, I don't want to contain the ambitions of young Australians. I think, in a country like Australia, we should be able to say that you can own your own home and you can have a superannuation balance which will help you achieve a safe, secure retirement. I think that's a reasonable aspiration that young Australians should have. That's what the generations before them were able to have.

We have a problem of intergenerational inequity in this country. Limiting the ambition of young Australians and making them choose between homeownership and superannuation—you know full well that, if you rip money out of superannuation from a young person, it's not going to go back. If you start raiding these balances, like they did during the pandemic, it's not going back. So you are making them choose between superannuation and the aspiration to own a home—an aspiration which I think is fair, which their parents had, which their grandparents had and which young Australians should have as well. But they should be able to have superannuation too. It is a false choice. It is a choice that harms young Australians and contains their aspirations. Saul Eslake described it as one of the worst public policy ideas of the 21st century. It is a containment of aspiration, and no-one should fall for it.

Honestly, watch out, young Australians! If that's what's in their cupboard, you don't want to stay in there long. God knows what's going to fall off the top shelf, if that's the best they've got—if the best they have to offer you is robbing you of your super and limiting your aspirations. This is from a party that claims to be the party of ambition and the party of aspiration. They want to limit the aspirations of young Australians, and no-one in this chamber should stand for it.

We know supply issues are putting pressure on the cost of housing. When house prices increase, saving for a deposit becomes an insurmountable roadblock. We know that homeownership is linked to short-, medium- and long-term economic security. That's why our Homes for Australia plan has an ambitious goal—a rightly ambitious goal—of building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade. This plan means training more tradies. It means funding more apprenticeships. It means growing the workforce. It means kickstarting construction by cutting red tape and providing incentives to state governments to get homes built quickly, because we cannot do this alone. Anyone who tells you that the federal government can do this alone is having you on. This requires the work, cooperation and collaboration of every single layer of government in our country.

We are delivering the biggest investment in social housing in more than a decade to help reduce homelessness. For renters doing it tough, we've increased rent assistance two years in a row and we are working with states and territories to make renting fairer. Considerable work is underway, right across our country, including in my home state of South Australia, to improve renters' rights, to improve the bargaining position between them and their landlords, to make it fairer and to make it more secure for them, because not everyone will own a home—not everyone will choose to own a home, actually; some will choose to rent. But the system needs to be fair and equitable, and renters deserve a strong voice in this chamber and across our states and territories as well.

Just today, the minister announced round 1 of the Housing Australia Future Fund programs. Remember the debate on that bill? How many times did we stand in this chamber while the Greens and the Liberals voted no? They voted to delay. Absurd! Well, today we've announced it will deliver 4,000 social and 9,000 affordable homes, including over a thousand homes for women and children escaping domestic violence and for older women at risk of homelessness. That sounds like a pretty sound policy outcome to me—a policy outcome which never would have been achieved without our bill, a policy outcome which others in this chamber tried to block, tried to delay and voted against.

We need to come together as a chamber in support of action on housing. At the moment, the only party in this place presenting a plan is the government. The parties opposite and the parties to my side come here with a single word on their lips: no. Young Australians should be asking themselves why. Young Australians should be asking themselves, 'What do they have to gain by blocking assistance for those seeking to buy a home and those seeking to rent?' There is a political vested interest here on nothing happening for those opposite. For the Greens, there is an opportunity to engage and there is an opportunity to be part of a solution which will make an impact on the lives of young Australians—an impact on the issue which is sitting heavily on their chests.

Young Australians feel deeply let down when it comes to the housing market. They feel locked out in a way that the generations which came before them did not. Their parents were allowed to have the ambition of a secure retirement and a home. Their grandparents were too. Young Australians deserve to be able to hold that ambition. They deserve a government who backs in that ambition and their aspirations for their future, and they have that government. What they don't have is a Senate chamber willing to put its own politics and nonsense aside and come in and back those young Australians and back reasonable plans in housing which will make a difference to their lives. Instead, here we are again, with the Liberal and National parties, who are seeking to rob young Australians of their aspiration for housing and super and who don't believe they deserve both. The Greens on the other side would rather secure clicks on their social media accounts from young people than vote for a better future for those very young people. That is a depressing state of affairs when it comes to housing policy in this country.

Young Australians deserve better. All Australians deserve better. As a country, we have the opportunity to make a choice. Do young Australians deserve the same opportunity that their parents and grandparents had to own a home? If your answer to that question is yes, then the only thing you should be doing when you walk into these debates is looking deep inside yourself for how you can constructively engage and deliver policies which will make a difference. I know there is political gain for the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens in watching these things fall over and fall apart, but, when you do that, you rob young Australians of that security in their future and you rob young Australians of that aspiration.

Our government is backing in the aspirations of young Australians. We believe those aspirations should be high. We believe that the millennial generations and those that come after them deserve the same kind of financial security their parents and grandparents had. They deserve to believe they can own a home; it is not asking too much. But they will never get there if the Greens put social media engagement over social impact and if the Liberals and the Nationals sign up to this nonsense idea that they have to choose between owning a home and having a secure retirement through superannuation. That is a false choice.

There is an opportunity to make more progress on housing here in our chamber today. I commend this bill to the Senate. I implore my colleagues to reflect deeply on this and support our bill.

Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We keep on saying it, but housing is something we really need, so I'm not sure why we are debating the merits of a bill that has been designed to increase the number of houses. The Help to Buy Bill 2023 not only increases the number of houses but helps people to buy a house. Sure, people will share equity with the government, but they will be on the housing ladder. It will give people who need it a hand up to get into the market.

As someone who has previously spent time wondering whether I would ever be able to afford a mortgage, I think a bill that helps people buy a house, a home, is a good thing. I'm sure most of those who jump in to apply for the first 10,000 spots will be first home buyers, but I also know this bill will support people on low to middle incomes who need to buy a new place following a relationship breakdown or who are downsizing due to a change in circumstances.

This scheme is due to run for four years, meaning 40,000 individuals, families and couples will be helped into a home. About 850 of those spots have been earmarked for Tasmanians. Eight hundred and fifty home purchases over the next four years—that's a whole lot of happy people who can now buy a home, people who thought they may not have been able to or would be saving for a deposit for years to come. And those 850 homes are on top of the home purchases already being supported through the housing scheme that is running in Tasmania.

This is a good thing, in my book. I know what it's like to be scraping together every cent to try and buy your first home. Back in the day when my youngest was just a baby, I went home when he was three months old so that we could afford a mortgage—so that we could afford to get the money in the bank to purchase a house. I like that the government will contribute up to 40 per cent of the deposit and loan amount for new builds, and 30 per cent for people buying existing homes. The extra 10 per cent means more new houses will be built in Tasmania and all over the country, and that is what we really need.

That is exactly what I was thinking when I fought to have a minimum guarantee of 1,200 homes built in Tasmania as part of the Housing Australia Future Fund negotiations. Whether they come as a result of this bill or another bill we will debate in the future, new houses are something we should be celebrating. We shouldn't be going around in circles debating, leading to the bill getting further and further away from becoming law.

I know the Greens have called for more support to help people buy a house, yet they are saying no to this bill—a bill that will support more people to buy a home. Go figure! They have a choice to help either 10,000 people or zero people to buy a home, and they're choosing zero, again. I'm getting deja vu from the Housing Australia Future Fund all over again. You can't say you're on the side of helping people with the housing crisis when you vote against bills that do just that. Saying the bill doesn't go far enough won't be a good enough explanation for Tasmanians who are waiting for this scheme to kick in.

The scheme draws on policy from a successful housing model in Western Australia, so we already know it has been tested. It takes a long time to save a deposit, find the right place and make sure you have enough for stamp duty and all the legal details. Often it's just for this part of a house purchase that people need help, and then, once they're on the ladder, there's no stopping them. If that happens, and after a few years they decide they want to negotiate their equity terms, they can. They might be able to buy the government out altogether or they might want to keep things plodding along with shared equity with the government. Either way, I am putting up my hand to say this bill is part of the solution we need to start making a dent in the housing crisis.

This won't be a silver bullet to fix everything. We know that the absolute best thing we can do is to build more houses—to build supply to keep up with demand. This will help 10,000 Australians. This will help 850 Tasmanians to achieve their dreams of owning their own house, and, in the words of Darryl Kerrigan, 'It's not just a house; it's a home.' Tasmanians, get your housing dreams in order. It's first in, first served, so make sure you don't miss the boat.

Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the government's Help to Buy Bill 2023 and Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023, and I thank Senator Tyrrell for her contribution, including quoting the incredible Mr Kerrigan—very well done from Senator Tyrrell!

These bills form just one part of this government's ambitious housing agenda, and this is an agenda that is absolutely about getting more Australians into their first home. It's an agenda that is about unlocking the investment that is desperately needed to address housing supply and housing affordability in this nation. It is an agenda that is, for the first time in a decade, squarely focused on providing the federal leadership, the Commonwealth leadership, that we need to build more homes and to make them more affordable.

The proposition in front of the Senate today is a simple one, and it is simply to support the aspirations of the 40,000 Australians who we can all assist today to get into homeownership with Help to Buy. It's that simple. It's a simple proposition about helping 40,000 people get into homeownership—the nurses, the teachers, the early childhood educators who could benefit from this scheme. It's about helping older single women who are approaching retirement and who can't afford to get into homeownership right now. It's about helping lower income couples who are trying to get ahead and who need that help to buy their first home. And later in the week, we'll have the chance to help thousands more people into homes too, homes that they can rent through our build-to-rent plan.

We have these two bills in front of the Senate this week, all while we're working to build 1.2 million homes in this country, to build the supply that we desperately need to make homes more affordable in Australia today and to get more people into homes that they can live in and make their lives in.

Now, we all know that the coalition does not support building more homes for Australians. They don't have a single policy to build a single new home in this country. And we know that they will not support these bills today. We have their record to look at. We have their record of a decade in government, where, for the majority of that time, they did not even think it was important enough to have a housing minister in this country. They presided over a decade where they did not lift a finger to build a single social and affordable home. They presided over a decade where they were completely missing in action, as we could see this housing crisis grow, as demand for homes clearly outstripped supply.

You would think that the Greens political party would come into this chamber today and direct some of their criticism at the coalition for failing, over a decade, to lift a finger to do anything about housing supply in this country. And you would think that the Greens political party would come into this chamber and work with us today to fix the mess that was left by the coalition, that was left by those opposite. You would think the Greens, with all their talk about housing over the last couple of years, would come into this chamber today and vote for bills to help 40,000 people who really need it into homeownership. You would think that they'd come into this place and vote for bills that will build more secure and affordable rental accommodation, our build-to-rent bills, later in this week too, but they've got form, as you know.

You would have thought that they would have supported the Housing Australia Future Fund to invest billions of dollars into social and affordable homes, instead of blocking it and delaying it for months—homes just like the 13,000 homes that we announced today through the Housing Australia Future Fund, homes that could have been on the ground sooner for the people who really need them if the Greens had not played politics and blocked and delayed those homes rolling out. But it's not the Greens' business model or their political model to actually work with the government on constructive solutions. And it's not the Greens' business model to put the criticism where it's due, which is with the coalition for presiding over a decade of absolute denial about what was happening in housing in Australia. Their business model is just to attack the Labor government, who is actually doing something about the housing crisis.

My message to the Greens today, as we look at this Help to Buy Bill and as we look at the build-to-rent bill later in the week, is: sure, attack Labor—we know that that's your business model. We know that that's your political model. We know it's who you are and what you do. But do not attack the 40,000 people who need these homes that we have on the table today. Do not attack those people. Do not attack the single women who are struggling to buy and who would benefit from this Help to Buy scheme. Do not attack the low-income families who would absolutely be able to get into a home under this Help to Buy scheme. Do not attack the essential workers—the early childhood educators, nurses, paramedics and teachers—who rely on this scheme getting through to be able to get that foot in the door and buy themselves a home with these Help to Buy bills. Don't do to those people what you did to the people who rely on the Housing Australia Future Fund. Don't make them wait. Don't get into the business of blocking and delaying. Don't get into the business of playing politics and attacking Labor when what you are actually doing is attacking the very people who will benefit from these bills today—the 40,000 people to whom we want to give a leg-up to actually get into homeownership today.

Again, we know that it's your model to attack Labor. We see it every day in this chamber. We see it in the pointless motions that get put forward. We see it in the jawboning political performances of the spokespeople of the Greens political party. We see all of that. But you have the chance to do something real, something that will actually impact people and will actually get 40,000 people—people who would not otherwise get into a home—into a home by supporting these bills. So attack the Labor Party all you like. Attack the Labor government all you like, but do not throw under the bus the 40,000 Australians who would benefit from these bills, get a leg-up, get a foot in the door and be able to buy their own homes. Do not do that.

We've seen what happened with the Housing Australia Future Fund. We've been able to announce 13,000 homes that are going to mean so much for people—so much social and affordable housing being provided to people that would have been provided sooner if the Greens had not blocked and delayed those homes. So I appeal to the Greens to pass these bills and support our Help to Buy legislation, because the Greens know that each and every housing measure makes a huge difference to people's lives. We all know that we need to get on with building 1.2 million homes over the next five years. We all know we need to help people into homeownership, and we all know that shared-equity schemes like Help to Buy are an absolutely critical way of doing just that. So the message to the Greens is to just get this done. Just get this done!

This is a scheme that will give thousands of people a leg up to buy their first home, because we know that servicing a mortgage and pulling together a deposit are two of the largest hurdles to homeownership. This scheme directly tackles that. It will see 40,000 Australians moving into their first home sooner. In partnership with a panel of lenders and the state and territory governments, the federal government will provide equity contributions of up to 30 per cent for existing homes. To support housing supply efforts, first home buyers will be further incentivised with a 40 per cent contribution for new builds. We want to encourage more new builds because that is critical to supply.

This scheme will genuinely help those who have, for too long, been just out of reach of homeownership. It will help because all that is needed is a deposit of two per cent to get involved—just two per cent, with the backing and security of the government. That is life changing for people. It will cut off years of saving for people. It will cut off years of effort they have to put into pulling together a deposit. It will fast-track homeownership for so many people, making what is just a dream for some a reality. That's what we have in front of us in the chamber today, a practical measure, a practical step that we can take to get more people—good people, good Australians, worthy people—into their first homes. The scheme has been set up appropriately. There are price caps and targets for eligibility. Help to Buy will avoid inflating house prices and making the situation worse, and it will absolutely be directed at supporting those who need it most.

We saw all of that. We saw all of its support in the Senate economics committee inquiry, which I chaired, into the Help to Buy scheme. The evidence could not have been clearer. We heard from AHURI. They said:

We certainly would like to see the bill passed. Shared equity programs have been some of the … most effective housing policy interventions.

We heard from Master Builders Australia. They noted:

The Help to Buy scheme adds to existing first home buyer incentives as part of a whole-of-housing policy approach to boosting supply and affordability.

We heard from National Shelter. They said:

National Shelter is supportive of shared-equity schemes to make homeownership more accessible and affordable, alleviating both the deposit required and the repayment amounts.

At the Senate inquiry, Housing Industry Australia said these bills are 'an important part of the mix to address our current housing shortages'. We also heard from housing advocacy group Everybody's Home. They said they 'support shared-equity models as they improve access to housing for those who need it'.

While the Greens political party is no housing expert, it even supported shared-equity schemes when it suited them to do so. A shared-equity model was, in fact, part of their 2022 election platform, but, provided with the option to establish one, they're actually standing in the way, which only makes the case again that this is about the Greens' business model, this is about the Greens' political model, and this is not about practical housing outcomes for Australians. That's the Greens for you: attack your own policy if it gives you a vehicle to attack the Australian Labor Party. So, again, for 40,000 people, this Help to Buy scheme will be life changing.

We have the opportunity in the Senate this week to help those people. This is targeted at worthy Australians who deserve to have the opportunity to get into their own home. It's targeted at people like older women struggling to buy a home. It's targeted at our essential workers, like our early childhood educators, paramedics and nurses, to get them into homes they can afford with small deposits and smaller mortgage repayments backed by the government. This is targeted at low-income families to help them get a foot in the door of a home they can call their own.

Now, we expect the Liberals and the rest of the coalition to oppose these measures. They had a decade to do something about housing supply, and they were missing in action the entire time. The Greens, on the other hand, talk a good game about housing. This is their opportunity to actually take a practical step and do something about it. This is their opportunity to help 40,000 people get into their first home, and they know that this is one of a suite of measures that we are putting in place to deliver more homes, and more affordable homes, for Australians. We know the only reason the Greens are opposing this is that it is their business model. Attack us all you like. Don't attack the people who need these homes right now.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to contribute to the debate on the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023, and I obviously endorse all of the comments of my Greens colleagues who've spoken before and those who will speak after. This issue is a fundamentally important one. An issue of debate in this place is how we can help those who are doing it pretty tough right now, and, rather than debating a piece of legislation that really gets to the heart of what is going on with the housing market in Australia, we've just heard speech after speech from members of the government whingeing and whining rather than doing and acting.

You'd be forgiven for thinking, given the speech made just previously, that this government has an opportunity to work with anyone. I listened very carefully to the Prime Minister's press conference this morning. Rather than being prepared to work constructively, negotiate responsibly and put in all the effort to try and get agreement across the chamber, what the Prime Minister said was, 'Get out of the way.' That is the type of attitude that is coming right from the top of this government—'Get out of the way'—as if somehow everyone in this democratically elected chamber should just roll over and get out of the way. I'm sorry, Mr Prime Minister, but that's not actually how democracy works, and it's not actually representative of this chamber. The Labor government has 25 votes in this place, out of 76, yet it has the arrogance to just whinge, whine, politick and demand that everybody else get out of the way. I think people who are really struggling to pay their rent right now and are holding their breath at another potential rate rise—certainly not a rate cut any time soon—would like a bit more cooperation and maturity from this government than just telling everybody else to get out of the way.

It is extremely disappointing that today the government have brought on these bills and want to force a vote on bills that they know will lose. They know they don't have the support of the chamber, because they haven't put in the effort. They haven't actually done the hard work of trying to come to a workable solution. They're not interested in negotiating with anyone else. When you have a Prime Minister whose attitude is that the rest of the chamber and the parliament should just get out of the way, that is not the attitude of a leader who wants to get things done and work collaboratively or who is listening to the very real concerns of members of the community right across the country who are struggling right now.

The fact is that I would love to be able to be in this place today talking about a bill, a piece of legislation, that would actually go to dealing with the issues that people are feeling—a bill that would actually deal with the cost of housing in this country and with offering some relief for the millions of Australian renters who can hardly pay the week-in, week-out rent, let alone save for a deposit for their own home. But this piece of legislation is totally inadequate. Rather than the government working with the Greens, the crossbench and others in this chamber to improve and deliver real solutions for people, we have a piece of legislation that is effectively useless. It does nothing to deal with those real issues.

This piece of legislation is like bringing a spoon to a gunfight. It's not even a knife; it's a spoon, being used to serve up some political rhetoric from the government while they refuse to put in the hard yards to compromise and to work collaboratively, when in fact that's actually what the Australian people want. Over and over and over again, we hear this. There's a reason that the Labor Party had their lowest vote on record since World War II at the last election. There's a reason that more and more Australians are not voting for either of the major parties: they're sick of the winner-takes-all attitude that delivers no solutions for people. That's why they want governments to have to work with others, to come up with workable solutions, good solutions, and to listen to the needs and the concerns of people in the community. But no; the Prime Minister just wants everyone to get out of his way. The political posturing, the whinging and the whining without actually putting in any of the effort—Australians can see right through that.

Unfortunately, this piece of legislation is so inadequate that it might help two per cent of people if they're lucky—sorry; 0.2 per cent of people, if they're lucky. That means that 99.8 per cent of Australians, who might some day love to own a home, are being left in the lurch, totally locked out of this. This proposed Help to Buy scheme would help only 10,000 Australians—0.2 per cent—while 5½ million adult renters per year would get nothing out of this. In fact, it could actually make the situation worse, because house prices will continue to climb, locking more and more and more people out of the housing market. People are finding life pretty tough right now, whether you're a renter or you have a mortgage. The cost of living is getting harder. The cost of everything is going up. It's becoming harder and harder for people to keep their heads above water.

I want to say to members of the community, whether you're a renter or a mortgage holder: if you feel that you're doing it really tough right now, you're not alone. Millions of others are feeling the same. That's why we in the Greens are so upset that this government is refusing to do some important things to relieve the pressure on you. It's why it's so frustrating that this government, rather than working for solutions, continues to try and bulldoze its rubbish bills through this place. When you go to the supermarket, everything costs more. Every month, people are worried that their landlord's going to put the rent up again. When you hear the Governor of the Reserve Bank telling people that they might have to sell their homes, that's just a kick in the guts—an absolute kick in the guts—for people.

Michele Bullock, only a couple of weeks ago, said that people would have to start cutting back on their spending, trading down to lower quality goods and services, dipping into their savings and working some extra hours and that, ultimately, they might have to sell their homes to keep their heads above water. This is not leadership. This is capitulation to the crisis and to the system that's not working for people.

There are some key things that in this place, this parliament, if there was a will, if the government was willing to work with us, we could get done. We could put a two-year freeze on rent increases so that people can at least catch their breath. We could get rid of the hugely generous tax incentives for property developers that continue to push housing prices through the roof. The big property developers don't care. They are not feeling it right now. It's young people, mums and dads and everyday working Australians who are struggling to keep their heads above water.

This government doesn't want to deal with that. They're too scared to confront the key causes of this housing crisis, because they don't want to upset their mates in the property industry. The statistics are just gobsmacking. If you are a childcare worker, there's no way you can possibly afford to save enough for a deposit to buy a house these days. In fact, it would take you 31 years to save for a deposit. Even then, if you got a loan today, it would be over 90 per cent of your wage. This is not realistic for people. Yet this piece of legislation does nothing to relieve that pressure or deal with that issue. If you are a sales assistant and work in retail, which so many Australians do—it's the most common profession in this country—you will never be able to afford a house on the current track. You will never be able to do it.

This piece of legislation, this wet lettuce to the housing crisis, does nothing to help you. Rather than the government working with the Greens, the crossbenchers and others in this parliament to deal with this issue, to put some solutions in place that will help people with the skyrocketing cost of rent and the unaffordability of housing, the government is not interested in that. It's all about a headline. It's all about making them feel like they have done something rather than actually doing something.

In South Australia, my home state, Adelaide was named one of the world's most unaffordable housing markets. That's in the world. This piece of legislation does nothing to help that. This legislation does absolutely nothing to help that. If you are a renter in Adelaide, according to monthly data from private analytics company PropTrack, Adelaide has the worst rental availability of any capital in Australia. So, if you're in Adelaide right now and you're feeling like you can't find an affordable rental, it's true; you can't. You're not alone, because so many other South Australians are dealing with the same issue. But I tell you what: this government is not helping you. They are leaving you on your own. This government is failing to help you because of its arrogance and inability to understand that the Australian people want this government to cooperate, to feel the pressures people are under and to put the politics aside and get something done that delivers real relief for people. Rents in Adelaide homes rose by 11 per cent last year. These bills do not help with that. The Albanese government is leaving South Australians in the lurch. It is ignoring them.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sometimes in this chamber I really struggle to accommodate the hubris and the fantasies painted by some colleagues who participate in these debates and the deliberate misinformation, the deliberate failure to tell the truth and the determination to give Australians—who are people of hope and endeavour—all the bad news about how things are ruined, how impossible it is. I'm the daughter of Irish immigrants who arrived with nothing. I know how hard it is to get a house. My parents took me home to a caravan. They worked really hard and they finally achieved their dream of getting a house. It's a big deal. It's built on the back of hope and hard work, and a bit of a hand when you need it, instead of all the huffing, puffing and negativity and game playing that is going on in this place.

Let's remember: a couple of years ago there was a change of government and the Albanese Labor government was elected to fix up a big problem we knew we had with housing. It's not a new one; it's been going on for a really long time. So, lest people become disheartened by the contributions of the Liberal-Green alliance going on here—the Liberal Party and the Nationals are joined up as usual, but this time they've added the Greens to their wall of negative noise to drive hope from the hearts of Australian people and tell them there is nothing to help them. But that is a complete misrepresentation: there is help. There has already been help in housing. We could topple that wall of negativity, that wall of oppression, that wall of despair, and get some legislation through this place. We're already hearing from speakers from the Greens and the Liberals, 'Oh no, we are not going to let this through.' Every day they delay, they make it harder for people who want to get a decent house, to begin their journey, to create somewhere safe to raise their family—and maybe they'll also come on holidays to Canberra and come here into the chamber.

Just to be clear: we already know that, as the Labor Party in government, we have brought a whole series of commitments to housing. So far, we've put $10 billion into the Housing Australia Future Fund to build 30,000 social and affordable homes. That's a lot of people. That's the goal—to get 30,000 that way. But that's not all we're doing. There's the $2 billion Social Housing Accelerator to deliver 4,000 social homes. There's the $3 billion New Homes Bonus to incentivise the states to build homes faster. There's the build-to-rent scheme we've been trying to get support for. We've helped more than—and in all the despair and negativity and 'woe is the world', there are really good stories for—get this number: 110,000 people, who we've helped into their own home through the expanded Home Guarantee Scheme.

Today we're here talking about a particular scheme to make sure that we assist people who really are finding it difficult to get enough money together. Instead of leaving them lingering, thinking they can never get into a house, the government has decided with this legislation to help people on low incomes get some equity from the government to help them get in on the ground and begin their housing journey. It's not a trap. It's a path to freedom. It's an opportunity and a chance for hardworking young and older Australians who find themselves in a situation where they haven't got a wealthy aunt, uncle, mother or father. Who are they going to look towards to get a little bit of help to get them on their homeownership journey? They're looking to the Labor government. That is what we are doing in here today.

On the back of our win at the last election, we're continuing to deliver on housing and the commitments we've made across a whole range of areas. Today we are bringing in legislation. And what have we got on that side? What did Peter Dutton say? Let me see if I can find his exact quote—because I don't want to misquote him! Peter Dutton says about this legislation to help Australians get into their houses:

… Labor's home buying scheme would see Australians rely on other taxpayers' money to purchase their home. Perversely, the government would then have equity in their home. That's not liberating—it's modern collectivism.

He should say that to people who are really struggling to pay their rent. Peter Dutton doesn't think your government should help you when you're in trouble. Peter Dutton says, 'No, no; this is not for you.' He's not speaking to people with a wealthy mum or dad. He's speaking to people who haven't got that opportunity or support. He's saying that the type of government that he leads will never help you.

But Labor is determined to assist you. That is why we have brought forward, once again, this Help to Buy scheme to ensure that Australians who have got a little bit together and have worked and struggled to get enough together can begin. The government says: 'We will stand with you. We will stand beside you. We won't just talk at you, flapping our gums.' That's what we've got here. They're bleeding hearts with crocodile tears, feigned sympathy and feigned empathy. All the while there is a determination to build a wall between you and the house that you could get if Labor could only get this legislation through the Senate. That is why I say to senators: don't just get out of the way, which is a phrase that's been used in the most ridiculous way by the previous contributor to this debate. Pull the bricks down one at a time. Give them to the Australians who want to put the bricks one on top of the other to build their homes. Give them a chance. That's all most Australians want—a fair go and a chance. If they need a little help from their government to get into the property market, then Labor understand that we can make an arrangement with you of that kind. We can have a bit of equity as a government, using taxpayer money, to help you get on the property ladder.

That's in contrast with Mr Dutton. You will have heard some of the debate saying: 'The states aren't on board. It's a big problem. It's impossible to deliver.' They're always with the problems and never with the solutions. They're always with the negativity and never with the hope. They're always with the no and never with the yes. That's what we are seeing. The Liberal and National Parties and the Greens together are always in the way of progress. Today is another example. David Crisafulli—you might have heard his name; he's the Queensland LNP leader—said this on 14 March: 'Programs that allow equity, like Help to Buy, are something that are firmly in our focus, and I want to work with Canberra to make sure the numbers we're talking about are far higher.' At least he's got a better idea than Mr Dutton.

As soon as Dominic Perrottet, former Liberal New South Wales Premier, heard about it, he said:

Key workers, single parents and older singles will be able to have the security of home ownership with a lower upfront deposit, a smaller loan, lower repayments, no lenders mortgage insurance and no interest on the Government's equity share in a property.

That doesn't sound like a really bad thing to me. Let's just break it down. The former Liberal Premier of New South Wales says that this helps older people, single parents and key workers get in and have the security of homeownership. It'll make sure that they have lower upfront deposits, because sometimes it's really hard to get that savings nest together. And, if the government shares the loan with them, they'll have a smaller loan. Dominic Perrottet got it. If they've got a smaller loan, guess what? They'll have lower repayments. Dominic Perrottet got it, but Mr Dutton and everybody who is sitting on that side of the chamber, and those here, around in the Greens' seats, still don't get it. Today they're standing up and making a song and dance because they think they might be able to get a few extra votes if they whinge enough and make Australians despair.

Dominic Perrottet noted that if this scheme gets up there will be no need for a lenders mortgage insurance. Importantly, he immediately saw that sharing the debt on a house at an affordable level that you can manage with a government is an important contribution and an important cooperative model of making sure people get into houses, because there is no interest on the government's equity in the property, and that's how it's supposed to work. You don't give up your dream. You work hard and save. You get enough money together—a little bit of money, enough to get yourself in there—and you go to the government and say: 'Look, I'm working hard. I'm saving hard. I need a place for me and my family. If you put up some of the money here, I can get into the housing market.' And that's what this is about. A lot of fancy words are going to get thrown around, and there will be a lot of huffing and puffing, but Dominic Perrottet made it really clear that all of the elements of this make sense to ordinary people who don't come in here and make the sort of noisy nonsense that we're hearing from the Greens and the Liberal and National parties.

Dominic Perrottet got it, and so did Matt Kean, the former New South Wales Liberal Treasurer. He said a shared equity scheme 'will help those facing significant barriers to homeownership buy their own place sooner'. That's a good thing; at least, it is in my book. I cannot understand why the Greens political party and the Liberal and National parties can't understand how important it is to give people this opportunity and hope.

They should be listening to a few people who have something to say to them. Chantel from Darling Heights, in the electorate of Groom, said: 'Without assistance like this, the chance of re-entering homeownership while being a renter is slim to zero.' Chantel gets it. Why can't you guys get it? Yvonne from Forestdale, in the electorate of Wright, said, 'My husband and I are currently renting, but we're expecting a newborn in May 2024.' I hope that that's all going well for you, Yvonne. She said, 'We want to have the security of our own place to grow our family.' And you should be able to do that. You should be able to do that, Yvonne—you and your husband and your new baby. But the people who are standing between you and that dream are the people in this chamber who continue to block this piece of solid legislation that Labor got elected to deliver. We got elected to do this. They need to let the legislation through. They need to vote yes and not no, just for a change.

Rebecca from Burton, in the electorate of Spence, said:

I'm a single income earner. I also have not received a decent pay rise for many years but finally due to receive one this year.

That's Labor. People have got a pay rise. People got a tax cut. She said:

It's been difficult to save a deposit of the normal required 20 per cent or more.

She is working hard; she is not quite at 80 per cent.

With this plan I may be able to save enough funds within the next two years. The plan will allow me to enter homeownership and get of the rent roller-coaster.

Now, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be great? Except that, at this stage, people in this chamber will vote, unless their consciences are pricked, unless they can see the fairness that is embedded in this piece of legislation, against it.

I am going to remain hopeful because I have given a speech here about why Australians should have hope. It is because the Albanese government is delivering housing for Australians. We are delivering it through multiple, multiple means. But the one that we are debating here today deserves the support of the Senate. It should give people, Australians, the chance at having their own home.

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Help to Buy Bill 2023, and I endorse the comments of my fellow Greens on this bill. Right now, the housing system in Australia is stacked in favour of property investors, banks and property developers, and this is not about a lack of ambition or optimism, as the previous speaker suggested; it's about the reality that faces people now, a reality completely different from my reality as a young person approaching the housing market decades ago and from our forebearers and what they had put together in the housing market. It is so different now. Just look at the tax concessions set to cost the public purse $176 billion over the next decade, firing up the housing demand and taking housing out of the realm of possibility for so many Australians who work diligently to save money every week and look at the possibility for them to own a house just drifting away into the future.

Let's look at the number of vacant properties that are left empty by developers to help drive up the price of housing. Housing policy in this country is geared towards pushing up housing prices, and the bill before us today is no different. It is more of the same. The Labor government may acknowledge that we are in the middle of a housing and rental crisis but their inaction and their inadequate and very poor policies speak louder than their words. We want to engage with Labor. We want to find a better way forward, a meaningful way of fixing the crisis, not a leg-up for a small number that will actually pour fuel on the fire rather than address the problem.

Across the country, millions of renters are struggling to keep their heads above water with house prices and mortgages only continuing to soar. The Help to Buy scheme is like throwing a bucket of water onto a house fire—

Honourable Senator:

An honourable senator interjecting

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

or taking a spoon to a knife fight, as my colleague just said. As we heard further from Senator Hanson-Young, it is a scheme that will help the 0.2 per cent of people lucky to get access to it but will deliver nothing to the 99.8 per cent for whom it will make things worse by driving up prices even further.

This bill was taken to a Senate inquiry where a lot of expert evidence was given that this will push up house prices. My colleague Senator Waters pointed to some of it. 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.

Senior economist Matt Grudnoff said:

The problem with these kinds of policies is that they simply increase demand for housing, and this increases the price of housing. The result is that it makes housing less affordable.

We need to be taking real steps to address the housing and rental crisis, not tinkering and not making the problem worse. Two-thirds of people in Australia are in housing stress according to a report from Everybody's Home. That means they are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. Housing affordability is worsening, hurting those paying off their mortgages, those saving for deposit, renters and people who can't afford to put a roof over their heads. Affordable rentals for households on the minimum wage have decreased 81 per cent over the last five years. According to the ABS, rents have increased at nearly double the rate of wages over the last year alone, putting millions of renters under significant financial stress and making it impossible for many to ever save enough to buy a home in the first place. This is pushing more people into homelessness.

The homeless rate in Australia, to our great shame, remains amongst the highest in OECD countries. It increased by five per cent between 2016 and 2021. That's an additional 6,000 people sleeping rough—sleeping outside and denied a basic human right of shelter. The only way we're going to solve this crisis is if the government steps in and starts building hundreds of thousands of homes itself. We want to work with Labor to get that kind of solution underway, and we don't want to do it by fuelling demand through policies that don't touch the sides.

Labor's policies will not address the depth of the crisis that we are facing. Help to Buy is a demand-side housing policy. It enables people to pay more for housing than they otherwise would be able to afford, and this guarantees a steady flow of capital into the housing market with limited supply. Inevitably, that pushes up prices. This is economics 101. Most Australians do not benefit from housing policies like this. In fact, only 0.2 per cent of Australians will be eligible for this scheme. So this scheme will actually make people worse off: the new home buyer, paying more for housing and being saddled with an impossible amount of debt; people trying to enter the housing market and finding the start line further and further out of reach, taking more and more time to save for a deposit; and those renting, on the verge of homelessness or homeless already, who face greater costs for housing.

The key group that benefits is investors. They rely on the rapid increase in house prices to ensure a return that's quick. They turn around their investments quickly and reap the benefits. The coalition loves demand-side solutions like this too. Just look at the first home buyer grant and the coalition's HomeBuilder scheme. These policies do not improve housing affordability for the vast number of Australians locked out of, or struggling with the cost of, housing. Demand-side solutions drive up prices and push the cost of housing out of reach for millions of Australians. Housing affordability is a huge problem affecting millions—in particular, women, young people, single parents, the unemployed, older renters, young renters and people with disabilities. The issues are widespread and big. Making housing affordable for all Australians will require much more comprehensive reform than we see in this bill.

Housing costs in my home state of South Australia are no different to the national picture and, in some cases, are much worse. Over the 14 years to 2020, Anglicare SA recorded a staggering 99 per cent increase in rental stress across South Australia. According to a recent Anglicare report, a single person on a parenting benefit living in South Australia, even when they are willing to share, could not afford any of the 1,600 properties advertised for rent—not one. Even for a working couple on minimum wage, 85 per cent of the rentals in Adelaide would be unaffordable. Rents in Adelaide are now increasing faster than anywhere else in Australia, with a 60 per cent increase over the last four years.

As South Australia's social housing stock has declined over the past decade or so, there has been a corresponding increase in homelessness. I see evidence of this every time I take a walk in the South Parklands, as I did on Saturday. The growing number of bright blue tents brings home the reality that ordinary South Australians are now faced with skyrocketing rents and unaffordable mortgage payments, forcing too many onto the streets, into the parklands and sleeping in their cars. It's a frightening prospect to lose your home, but we're seeing more and more South Australians slipping through the net. Over 184,000 families are on public housing waiting lists nationwide, and there are 4,000-odd in South Australia. This is pushing those on low incomes into homelessness, and we need comprehensive solutions, not bandaids that make the problem worse.

The rise in Adelaide house prices is more than double the national average, while repayments on a median dwelling have increased by almost $2,000 a month since 2022. It is beyond contention that housing tax concessions, including negative gearing and capital gains tax, are pushing house prices ever higher and out of reach of the most common occupations in Australia. If a primary school teacher began saving for a home deposit today it would take until 2036 to save a 20 per cent deposit on a median priced home. If a full-time childcare worker took out a home loan today they would need to spend 92 per cent of their income on repayments, assuming an 8.8 per cent interest rate. And a nurse would have to spend 50 per cent of their income servicing a home loan. It really should not be this hard.

Labor's so-called plan to tackle the housing crisis is to rely on profit-hungry developers to build expensive homes that too few can afford and to give billions of dollars in tax handouts to property investors, which deny millions of renters the chance to buy a home. On the other hand, we in the Greens have a comprehensive plan to tackle the housing crisis: capping rent increases, scrapping the tax handouts for property investors that go to so many on high incomes, and investing billions in building hundreds of thousands of good-quality homes to be sold and rented at prices that Australians can afford.

Investor housing tax concessions set to cost $176 billion over the next decade are helping to push housing prices up in capital cities. They've gone up by 34 per cent since 2020. These handouts are $176 billion worth of fuel that Labor is pouring on the raging fire that is Australia's housing crisis. Until Labor scraps them, we will never get this crisis under control. The reality is that we'll tackle the crisis until we phase out that negative gearing, the capital gains discount and the massive tax handouts for property investors. With the money saved from phasing out those tax handouts we could fully fund the Greens' plan to establish a public property developer to build 610,000 good-quality homes to be sold and rented at below-market prices. This would save an average renter who is participating in the program $5,200 in rent annually and the average first home buyer $260,000 on the price of a home. Our policy would transform the lives of millions of people.

But what about those who can't afford to buy a home? Across this country there are seven million renters who are in precarious renting arrangements. They are unable to push back against unfair rent hikes and dodgy landlords and agents who don't do basic repairs. The system is stacked against renters, and they need someone in their corner to fight for them. That's why we want to establish a national renters protection authority to enforce national tenancy standards and establish a national renters protection structure. It will have the power to independently investigate breaches of rental law, fine individual landlords and real estate agents for breaching renters' rights and refer serious offenders for prosecution in states and territories. Along with proactive investigations targeted at compliance with new rent caps and rights to lease renewal on minimum standards, that authority would be the first port of call for renters nationwide and would be a major assistance to those who are renting. Right now, around most of Australia, there is zero protection against unlimited rent increases and nothing to stop renters from being forced to move every year without warning.

Labor are the party of property investors and private developers, and we are standing for renters and first home buyers and are asking Labor to listen to our proposal to reconsider a plan that doesn't meet the crisis as we face it. We need to do so much better. We are a wealthy country and we can put a roof over everyone's head in our nation. We can enforce rent caps and freeze rents. Australian renters are insecure and powerless compared with those in many other countries, and we need to improve protections for renters rights.

Let's face it, developers will always put profit before social service, so we must agree that there is a level of market failure right now and we must have the full and comprehensive solutions that deal with it. Government policy that drives up house prices is a choice. It's the wrong choice. It's not one we in the Greens intend to make. Housing should be a basic social right, not a source of wealth accumulation. We can put a roof over everyone's head, and that should be the goal of housing policy in Australia.

Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Help to Buy Bill 2023. This bill is how a lot of policies in this country work: the Liberals and Nationals, either intentionally or by their own recklessness and incompetence, create a crisis—in this case, the housing crisis. As the CEO of Homelessness Australia, Kate Colvin, has said: 'There's no disputing that the previous federal government left an absolute mess in the housing system.' So the Liberals create a crisis; the Australian people vote them out; Labor comes in with a sensible, evidence based solution to the crisis; and the Greens, rather than working constructively with the government to deliver in the best interests of the country, decide to hold up the solutions so they can put out media releases complaining that nothing is getting fixed.

Now, we have a situation where it's almost a year since this bill, Help to Buy, was introduced to parliament, and we are still debating it rather than getting on with this policy, because we are blocked, on the one hand, by the Liberals and Nationals, who created this crisis to begin with and who say no to everything, and the Greens party, who say they care about solving the crisis but who, the problem is, care even more about campaigning about the crisis. The Liberal and National parties and the Greens party are two sides of the same coin. All are putting their own political interests before the national interest. It is a disgrace, when you have people living in their cars, living in tents, living on the street, for political parties to put their own grandstanding before providing more homes.

Labor's Help to Buy Scheme is very simple. If we pass this bill, it will support up to 40,000 Australian households to purchase a home of their own. The federal government will invest in up to 40 per cent of the purchase price for new homes and 30 per cent for existing homes. So you will only need to get a mortgage for 60 or 70 per cent of the purchase price, which means the amount you need to save for a deposit is considerably lower. This bill is a lifeline for those who do not have wealthy parents to ask for a leg-up, for a deposit. The bill also means that, because your mortgage is considerably smaller, your repayments are considerably smaller. So not only does it make the home more affordable to save for; it makes it more affordable to pay off. This bill makes housing attainable for tens of thousands of Australian families who otherwise might never own their own home.

There are caps on income and property value, to ensure that this scheme is really targeted at those who need it most. It's a principle you would think everyone could get behind—and you'd be right to think it, because the Greens party even supported a shared equity scheme in their own political platform taken to the last election. The Greens political platform says: 'The Greens will establish a shared ownership scheme to help people currently locked out of the market to own their first home.' It's right there in black and white. The Greens tell the Australian people they support a shared equity scheme to deal with the housing crisis, but, when it gets to the Senate, they hold it up so they can complain that there is nothing being done!

But it's not only the Greens who are fighting against themselves over this bill. Their partners in crime are the Liberal Party, who can't agree about their position on this bill either. Former New South Wales Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet was a big fan of Labor's shared equity scheme. In fact, he was such a big fan that he copied it in his own 2022 state budget. Premier Perrottet said at the time:

I understand the federal Liberal Party opposed Prime Minister Albanese's scheme [but] I think it makes sense … providing equity support for first-time buyers …

And he went on to say:

Key workers, single parents and older singles will be able to have the security of home ownership with a lower upfront deposit, a smaller loan, lower repayments, no lenders mortgage insurance and no interest on the Government's equity share …

There are, of course, shared equity schemes in place in a number of states, including Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In Tasmania, the Liberal government recently expanded their shared equity program because it was so popular. The Tasmanian Liberal housing minister has said their shared equity scheme:

… has shown itself to be an incredibly popular program that is supporting Tasmanians to enter private home ownership …

I know Mr Dutton thinks that Liberals down south are a bunch of dirty lefties. That's why he's just completed a hostile factional takeover of the New South Wales branch. But what do his own Queensland colleagues say? The Queensland LNP leader turned around and had some comments about a shared equity program just three months ago. He said: 'Programs that allow equity are something that is firmly in our focus, and I want to work with Canberra to make sure that the numbers that we're talking about are far higher.'

It's not just state Liberal leaders who support shared equity schemes. Let's look at what recent federal Liberal leaders have had to say about them as well. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has supported this approach for over 20 years. In 2003, he said:

… by allowing homeowners to use equity as well as debt finance, homeowners will benefit from a lower cost of home ownership …

As we know, the current Liberal leader, Mr Dutton, ran a very long and nasty campaign to undermine and sack Mr Turnbull. Unfortunately for him, his own caucus colleagues said they would rather have Scott Morrison as leader than Mr Dutton. I won't reflect on what this tells us about how the opposition leader's own colleagues view him, but what did former prime minister Morrison say about shared equity schemes? In 2017, as Treasurer, Mr Morrison said the Victorian shared equity scheme was 'very interesting'. I think: good on them for having a good crack at this.

This is all pretty astonishing. You've got the Greens party voting against a policy that was taken to the last election on their own platform, and you've got the Liberal Party voting against a policy that is supported by their two most recent federal leaders and most, if not all, of their state leaders. That really tells you all you need to know. There's no real debate to be had about whether this bill would help people to own their own homes. We know the policy works, because there are already very successful versions of it in a number of states. The Liberals and the Greens—the Tories and the tree Tories—would rather just see housing remain unaffordable so that they can complain about it. It's one of the most disgraceful things I've seen in this place.

I do worry about the infighting in the Greens party on housing. It seems they can't agree on their own position. They support shared equity schemes, but then they also oppose them. Their platform calls for the building of one million new homes, but their housing spokesperson spends most of his time campaigning against new developments near his own house. In the last two years alone, the Greens housing spokesperson has opposed a plan to build 855 mixed-purpose dwellings at the disused Bulimba Barracks site. He's campaigned against a 220-home aged-care facility in Holland Park.

It's not just the Greens member for Griffith who opposes any new homes being built near his own house. In Sydney the Greens are opposing the Minns Labor government's plan to build new affordable homes near train stations. The Greens member for Balmain says that building up to 185,000 new homes would be 'unlikely to have a meaningful impact' and would, rather, 'further threaten our tree canopy targets'. At the very same time it was reported last year that one of the Greens New South Wales senators planned to bulldoze thousands of trees in order to subdivide their Port Macquarie investment property into three luxury rentals. Can you believe it? The Greens oppose affordable homes near train stations because of tree canopy targets, but they have no problem with bulldozing trees to subdivide their own investment properties. And it goes on and on. The Greens member for Brisbane opposes an empty sand and gravel factory in Teneriffe being turned into residential apartments because it would impact 'the unique character of the neighbourhood.' It is remarkable. The Greens want to build one million homes—just as long as they aren't anywhere near their own homes.

Then you've got the Greens housing spokesperson repeatedly using the word 'landlord' as a slur during question time. I wonder if he throws that around during Greens caucus meetings, because I'm sure that that would get awkward pretty quickly, considering the Sydney Morning Herald reported last year that seven Greens MPs and their spouses own 14 investment properties. So the Greens are a party of landlords pretending they're tough on landlords. Can the Greens housing spokesperson explain how that works? Can he explain how he simultaneously supports and opposes a shared equity scheme? Can he explain how he simultaneously wants to build one million new homes but opposes any homes being built in his seat?

Now, of course, it's not only the Greens party that is hellbent on decreasing the supply of affordable homes. The Liberal Party in my state of New South Wales has a very fine track record of driving the housing crisis. During its 12 long years in office, the state Liberal-National government sold off 7,600 public housing properties across the state. That's billions of dollars worth of social housing that could have come in handy during the housing crisis. But, other than privatising and selling off social and affordable homes, what ideas do Liberals and Nationals actually have for housing? Well, it turns out they have one idea. They want to raid your superannuation fund to pump up the housing market. The Liberals and Nationals' antisuper policy achieves two things. Firstly, it makes you poorer in retirement and, secondly, it makes housing even more unaffordable.

Some of the critics of the Liberals' housing policy have been absolutely scathing. One said:

… pumping more money into the housing market by letting people access their superannuation savings … would probably lead to further increases in the cost of housing.

Guess who that was? The former Liberal finance minister Mathias Cormann. Another critic said:

Young people need their super for retirement, not to try to take pressure off an urban housing bubble …

That was the deputy leader of the Liberal Party. Another said:

… a thoroughly bad idea … It's not what the superannuation system is designed to achieve.

That was former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Another bloke said:

I think [Malcolm Turnbull] got it right … it's not good policy and I agree with him … you don't want to fuel prices.

Guess who that was? That was the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, back in 2017. So if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, thinks it's a terrible policy and the opposition deputy leader, Sussan Ley, thinks it's a terrible policy then for what reason are we here?

You only need to look at who and what's driving this policy. It's Senator Bragg, who spent his working life before coming to this place as policy director for the Financial Services Council and the big business Business Council of Australia. The big banks and financial companies put him in the Senate, and now he's delivering them some return on investment, with constant attacks on industry super. Senator Bragg's paymasters, the banks, don't earn any interest when your savings are growing in industry super funds, but if that money is in high-interest, high-fee mortgage accounts then you're talking about even bigger profits for the big banks. That's what these policies are all about—a wealth transfer from your super funds to the profits and dividends of the big banks. You don't need to take my word for it, because that's precisely the point the opposition leader himself made in 2017.

While the Greens are opposing developments and the Liberals and Nationals are raiding your super, we're getting on with investing in more housing. Just today, the Minister for Housing announced 13,700 new social and affordable houses out of the Housing Australia Future Fund. That number includes 4,220 social and 9,522 affordable homes, including 1,267 homes for women and children escaping domestic violence and for older women at risk of homelessness. The Liberals and Nationals voted against that fund, and the Greens held it up in this chamber for months. Well, we're getting on with fixing the housing crisis. The Greens party should be ashamed of the politics they're playing with this.

Debate interrupted.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being almost 1.30, we will move to senators' two-minute statements.