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

I have 10 seconds left and in that 10 seconds I foreshadow that I will be moving the second reading amendment standing in my name, as circulated in the chamber.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Help to Buy Bill 2023 is a bill that won't help anyone. Right now, Queenslanders are sleeping under bridges and on riverbanks. In one of the world's richest states, working families with children are living in cars. Where do they toilet or shower? It's inhuman. Rents are skyrocketing—if a rental can be found. House prices are reaching record highs. This is a housing crisis, one of the worst we've faced. It's an inhuman catastrophe.

The Albanese Labor government wants to look like it's doing something. Enter the Help to Buy Bill. Under this plan the government wants to own a significant part of your house. If it's an existing place, the government wants to own 30 per cent; if it's a new place, 40 per cent—with the government paying for part of it with low-income earners. While a 40 per cent subsidy might sound attractive, it's fatally flawed. If the government just borrows more money for this plan then one thing is going to happen. When you give people 40 per cent more money to buy a house, house prices are going to go up.

The Bills Digest notes:

In 2022, the Productivity Commission concluded that—unless it is well-targeted … assistance to prospective home buyers presents too great a risk of increasing housing demand and, consequently, house prices.

The government's own Productivity Commission warned them this plan would increase house prices. Even the Labor government recognises this. That's why they've severely limited the number of places available under the scheme—so that house prices aren't drastically increased. There's a contradiction right there. If the government is only opening limited spaces so there's no impact on house prices, then it's an admission the scheme will not help many people.

The problem of increasing house prices is one of too much demand for the amount of supply. This bill will only increase the amount of demand and increase house prices. In the absence of more supply, we need to decrease demand, not increase it. As Dr Cameron Murray from Fresh Economic Thinking accurately said:

If you want people to have cheap housing, give them cheap housing. You can go and do all the financial tricks in the world but at the end of the day if they've paid that price, someone's paying the price.

This bill's core concept and premise is flawed and possibly a lie. We can't subsidise our way out of a house price problem. Looking at the bill's details—or lack of details—we see the problem is worse.

Firstly, let's look at profit and loss and renovations. One of the most concerning questions is how the government will treat profits and losses and renovations. To these questions, this bill has no answers. How much of the profits will the government take if you sell your house? We don't know. How much of the loss will taxpayers pay if house prices go down or the homebuyer defaults on their mortgage? Australian house prices have aggressively and consistently risen for 30 years. What if they fall? The bill is silent on how this would be handled. Would taxpayers be forced to pay for the entire loss on someone's mortgage? The government basically acts as a mortgagor, second to the bank. Does this mean the bank gets first call to recoup all their losses and the taxpayer simply has to cop the loss on whatever is left over? We don't know.

If someone improves the value of the house with renovations, does the government take 40 per cent of the improved value while doing nothing? We don't know. Imagine tearing up carpets, swinging hammers and sanding with bare hands for six months or a year, and the government takes 40 per cent of the profits from that hard work of yours. That's entirely possible under the bill as currently drafted. Under the government's Help to Buy Bill, Australians could become slaves in their own homes. We cannot wait for this bill to be passed and a minister to make a decision later down the track. These matters must be clarified and explained in the bill. Homebuyers and taxpayers deserve to know what the risk is here.

Secondly, let's look at some criteria. The eligibility criteria are clunky and don't cater for differences between states. The maximum income is set at $90,000 for singles and $120,000 for couples. This is despite the average house price and the required mortgage varying hugely between states and between towns. In Darwin, the average house price is $504,000. In Sydney, it's $1.2 million, more than double, yet the same income thresholds apply. The price thresholds are not available in the bill, and it appears the government has not yet published thresholds. When it comes to the housing crisis, one size doesn't fit all, yet that's exactly what this bill tries to do. We're just meant to pass the bill as a blank cheque and trust that the bureaucrats and the minister will get it right down the road—maybe.

Thirdly, let's look at the constitutional basis. This bill is completely outside the federal government's power. Some reviewers have said that Help to Buy is built on a 'complex constitutional foundation'. That may be the understatement of the year. Put very simply, under the Constitution, this is not the federal government's job. To make this bill legal, there are a huge number of constitutional headaches, state government agreements and transfers of powers. Federal parliament simply shouldn't be dealing with this. It's outside of the powers granted to us under the Constitution.

Confirming this bill's complexity, the government has tabled a late amendment to the bill attempting to clarify a set of constitutional issues. The House of Representatives passed this bill way back in February and then immediately introduced it to the Senate, seven months ago, yet we're only now seeing this amendment dealing with core issues. What is going on? Concerningly, the government appears to have given up on getting the constitutional issues correct. The bill's supplementary explanatory memorandum, at 1.34, explains that if any of this bill is unconstitutional—if it's unconstitutional!—the minister will have the power to use executive decree to amend the primary legislation. This is absurd. This is an extraordinary power to give a minister. Fancy putting a bill into the parliament like this.

The late amendment and this insane backup power confirm the constitutional headache this bill is and that we should not pass it. Under our Constitution's foundation, competitive federalism, it's the responsibility of the state governments to come up with their own programs. This fosters innovation and competition policy and makes sure we find the best way to do something—and it ensures accountability. The federal government charging in and taking over areas for which it has no constitutional responsibility won't fix these issues. It will make it worse.

Fourthly, let's look at superannuation. Instead of the government owning your home, One Nation says, 'You should own your own home'—a groundbreaking concept! We propose that Australians should be able to use a portion of super towards their home. Owning a home is one of the best predictors of whether people will be able to have a comfortable retirement. The purpose of super is a comfortable retirement. So why shouldn't people be able to use some of it towards a house? Under One Nation's policy, it would be your own super account that owns 40 per cent of your home, not the government. If you sell your home, the profits go back into your super so that your retirement is still protected, using the money you've saved instead of the inflationary, endless money pit that the government uses to borrow. The risk of this increasing house prices is far reduced. After all, it's your money.

Fifthly, let's look at housing policies. Unlike the government, One Nation has a full set of policies to properly address both supply and demand and get Australians owning their own home. Currently, there is both too much demand and too little supply in housing, and both are putting pressure on housing. To fix the housing crisis, we need to address the core issues: demand and supply. Yet this so-called Help to Buy bill does nothing to fix it. Look at demand. There's a demand side issue that no-one except One Nation is willing to acknowledge. No. 1 in demand is immigration.

The Albanese government's outrageously high, record high, and increasing immigration intake is fuelling huge demand on rent and house prices. Prior to COVID, the number of temporary visa holders in the country was around 2.3 million people. As of the end of 24 July, that number is now 2.8 million, more than 10 per cent of our population. These are hard numbers and facts, yet the government has continued to lie, claiming, 'We're just catching up on immigration.' Oh, really? We haven't just caught up; we've blown the record out of the water. We're nearly half a million people above the record. Using the average household size of 2½ people implies a need for more than 200,000 houses just to cater for new arrivals.

Last year, the Albanese government promised to crack down on the level of immigration, yet there were 335 net arrivals in the first seven months of 2024—that's 15,000 people higher than the same time last year, which was a record, so we're getting a new record. This is a huge reason why we're in a housing crisis, with rents skyrocketing and house prices reaching new records, yet the government won't say a word about it. The person responsible for this immigration program, Minister Clare O'Neil, has now been appointed Labor's Minister for Housing. What a joke! One Nation's proposal is practical, common sense based on real-world data. Simply return the number of temporary visa holders in the country to pre-COVID levels, and that would immediately free up 200,000 houses. From there, immigration would be capped at the level for which Australia can build housing and infrastructure to cater for new arrivals. In the middle of a housing catastrophe, we must put Australians in houses first before we allow more new arrivals into our country.

Under demand: foreign ownership. To reduce demand and open up more supply, One Nation would ban foreign ownership of residential property. Australians are banned from buying a house in China, yet China is the largest foreign buyer of real estate in Australia. A single real estate agent in Sydney sold $135 million in property to Chinese buyers in just six months. New Zealand and Canada, similar countries to ours, recently banned foreign ownership of housing. It's simple, clear and practical—putting Australians first. Until we get Australian citizens out of tents and cars and into houses, we shouldn't be letting foreigners buy residential property. Under our proposal, foreign owners would have to sell to an Australian buyer. If the foreign owners failed to sell in two years, the house would be subject to government auctions open to first home buyers only in the first round and to other Australians in the second round. All this is possible and can be done; it just takes truthful politicians with the guts and political will to put Australians first.

Another demand is about people's mortgage scheme. One Nation would ditch Labor's half-baked housing schemes, including Help to Buy and the Housing Australia Future Fund. We would replace them—the bureaucrats—with a new program called the people's mortgage scheme. We would offer government issued mortgages at five per cent interest fixed for 25 years—no variable, changing interest rates, cheaper than current mortgages from a bank and with minimal risk to the taxpayer thanks to the long-term fixed nature. Forget the government owning your home under Help to Buy; One Nation will make sure the government helps you own your own home in full.

Many first home buyers can't get a loan because of HECS debts, so that raises another point. Under the people's mortgage scheme, first home buyers can roll their HECS debt into the mortgage to pay it off. That will give them access to a mortgage that they can't get anywhere else and let them start paying for their house early.

I now go to the supply side. All these policies must go hand in hand with huge improvements to the supply of housing. We need to build more houses, so look at construction codes and undersupply. Builders are currently drowning in a sea of red tape. Every single new home must be built to an NDIS silver-level standard. Construction consultants estimate that this requirement alone adds $50,000 to the cost of a new dwelling. We should make efforts to take care of our severely disabled, yet we cannot increase the cost of every new home by $50,000 while we're in an affordability crisis. The National Construction Code must be simplified so the tradies can get on with the job. We want them to spend more time swinging a hammer rather than flipping through paperwork.

Next I go to supply and materials. One Nation would apply a three-year holiday for GST charged on building materials. We need more houses built. Government shouldn't be standing in the way of someone building their first house, because they want to make GST on the transaction. And we need to open up our timber supplies. Australia has a huge continent and abundant timber reserves. Despite this, we're in the unbelievable situation of needing to import timber from countries with environmental standards below ours. A sustainable timber industry is Australia's prime renewable resource; it literally just grows back every year. One Nation supports our timber industry so we have the supplies to build houses sourced right here in our country.

In conclusion, the housing crisis—the housing catastrophe—continues to rage on and Australians are suffering. Unfortunately, the Albanese Labor government and the Greens are more interested in looking good rather than doing good. The Help to Buy Bill 2023 will not help Australians realise the great Australian dream of owning their own home. Labor's plan could end up with Australians being slaves to the government in their own home. One Nation cannot support this bill without key details of its operation clarified and without action on the other, far more important elements of housing supply and demand.

One Nation believes Australians should own their own home. We have the solutions and the guts to make the great Australian dream an Australian reality.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Klaus Schwab tells us, 'You will own nothing and be happy.' He is with the World Economic Forum. I wonder why he says that. 'You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.' This Labor legislation—the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023—offers a real glimpse of this hideous future and how socialism will be imposed in Australia disguised as a helping hand by a benevolent government. So much for the great Australian dream, which has now been reduced to only partly owning your own home. The economic security, peace of mind and sanctity of homeownership are things that this Labor government and their Marxist confederates in the Greens would happily deny to the Australian people.

Labor cannot be trusted on housing. Two years ago, it promised to fix the housing crisis. Labor promised $32 billion of taxpayers' money to build 1.2 million new homes by 2030. In two years, not a single home has been built. How could there be when there is virtually no-one left able to build them? For all the millions of people Labor has brought to Australia—more than the entire population of Adelaide—only 51,000 were still workers and only 1,800 were qualified tradies. That was in the 2022-23 figures. Of 730,000 people brought in, only approximately 51,600 were skilled workers and, of that, only 1,800 were qualified tradies. So where is the investment in the Australian tradies? Where was Labor's support for One Nation's apprenticeship scheme? There wasn't any. There hasn't been any. During the 2½ years you've been in office, you've done absolutely nothing about it. It is no wonder there are no new homes being built. I hate to tell the Australian people, but they will not be built very soon either.

Labor's signature policy is the so-called Housing Australia Future Fund, borrowing and investing $10 billion and building 30,000 affordable homes in five years from the returns—that is, if they get returns. It works out at less than $84,000 per home, about $400,000 less than what a new home actually costs to build these days. Again, not a single home has been built. Labor make announcements as if announcements alone fix the housing crisis. Labor make these announcements while ignoring their own policies that drive the housing crisis.

The worst of these is record immigration. Two years ago, Australia already had a shortfall of at least 650,000 homes. Labor has since allowed more than 1½ million people to come to Australia, all of them needing homes that could be occupied by an Australian already living and working here, let alone allowing in the refugees or releasing those held as illegals in the detention centres, who also require housing. It does not make any sense at all but, then again, neither does this Labor government. This is the same government that moved the former Minister for Home Affairs into the Housing portfolio—putting a fox in charge of the henhouse. She and the former immigration minister were hopeless in their portfolios, so for her to go to the Housing portfolio is ridiculous.

The housing crisis is primarily an issue of supply and demand. High immigration increases demand when we should be reducing it. Lack of new housing restricts supply when we should be increasing it. High demand and low supply drive up house prices and rents. Labor is not building homes to address low housing supply. Labor is not lowering immigration to reduce housing demand. Labor is making this housing crisis worse. No number of worthless, empty Labor announcements will make the truth go away.

The Greens are even worse when it comes to housing. They want the state to own it all—all of it—and Australians to own none of it. It is straight out of the Marxist playbook. Their call for a rent freeze will, without any doubt, force landlords out of the market and reduce the availability of rental properties even further. Their call to get rid of capital gains discounts and negative gearing will suppress property investment and also reduce the availability of rental properties. The Greens do not understand that we must incentivise property investment to increase rental availability and reduce rental prices. We have to kick Labor and the Greens out if we are going to have a chance to fix this housing crisis.

We have to implement One Nation's housing policy. One Nation will lower immigration to reduce housing demand. One Nation will ban foreign ownership of residential property to increase housing supply for Australians. New Zealand and Canada have done it, and even the coalition here has adopted this part of our policy. One Nation will relax restrictions on renting spare rooms and granny flats to improve housing availability, and One Nation will enable superannuation funds to invest some of an individual's super as equity in the individual's home to improve housing affordability. Under this policy, Australians will own everything and be truly happy. They will be happy not because some crackpot socialist tells them they will be but because they will be secure in their own homes. One Nation will always stand against the encroachment of socialism being propagated by Labor and the Greens. We will stand against this useless legislation, which does nothing to address the causes of the housing crisis and does everything to impose socialism on Australia. One Nation will fight for Australians.

As my colleague Senator Malcolm Roberts indicated about the NDIS—and this is what I've been told—when new builds come into play, you will have to build them as NDIS friendly. I can back this up because I went to one of those companies that build these demountable houses. I said, 'Is this what you've got available?' and they said, 'Yes, but now we have to take it down because the building codes have all changed and we actually have to build bigger doorways and comply with a certain element of building now.' So what we're doing now is adding to the cost of a new build for people to have these requirements in the housing market which they will never properly need. We have to be realistic about it because that cost is going to be an extra $50,000 or $60,000 per build in Australia. Australians cannot afford it. It needs to be addressed if that is truly the case. Just because there are some people in this country—and my heart goes out to them—who are disabled for whatever reason, you do not impose on the rest of the country that they have to build a house for their own special needs or the special needs of someone else who might visit or, one day, might buy it. The fact is we are imposing these restrictions on people.

Another thing that needs to be addressed with housing is—apart from the foreign investment that we have, which is driving up demand and driving up the price of houses and so the banks loan more money to the Australian people so they make more money out of interest repayments—that we also have to have a good look at the GST that people pay on new houses, which is somewhere between, on a new build, 40 and 45 per cent. That's how much it costs when building a new house. That is just over the top. No wonder Australians can't afford it. The cost of housing in relation to a person's wage in this country is just out of the realm.

So for Labor to sit there and have the same old rhetoric, especially from Senator Ayres, is pathetic. It's just laughable the way he sits there and says, 'You are against the youth owning a home.' Because they can't answer your questions with decent logic, they say, 'Let's go and blame the other side.' That's because I voted against this stupid dog of a bill which won't work and I don't want to see taxpayers' money wasted or see a socialist government having ownership in their homes. That is exactly what they are doing—'You'll own nothing and be happy because the government is going to own your home.' Honestly, people: think about it. On what renovations you do and what you put in that house do you think that the government is going to back you up? Their policies change all the time. Whoever is in government, you can't rely on this mob whatsoever. Whoever is in government here, if you think that that is going to see you through to the end of the day and you will have pure ownership of your own property, think twice about it. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could bloody kick them, this bloody mob here. I think they are absolutely useless and hopeless in their policy. That's why no-one voted for them today. They were sitting next to the crossbench by themselves with one crossbencher that actually supports them on this policy, because we can all see through it.

It's actually a dog of a bill. It hasn't been well thought out. They haven't done any of that. They abuse and throw snide remarks across the chamber as if none of us care about the youth. Guess what? I have four people out there who would dearly love to own their own homes. Are you saying I don't care about them, that I don't care about my nieces and nephews and the people who are with me? No. I am looking after their best interests, unlike you. You make these false promises and offer the world, but you can't back it up. That's the problem with this Labor government. You are only chasing votes and you'll throw the money where you think it's going to do best to encourage these people to back you all the way. For two years you've had the money there and you haven't built one home. Why? I ask through the chair. I ask the question of Senator Ayres. Why has not one house been built but $35 million has been spent on administration fees? That tells you that bureaucrats are running it. They wouldn't have a clue about policy. They are not grassroots. They don't understand what the hell is happening out there. They don't understand that people dearly want to own their own homes.

The fact is that the real issue here is the high immigration of people that they bring into this country—1½ million in this country. That's the problem, because they all have to have a house or somewhere to live. You keep bringing them out. The damage has been done. You can say now that you're going to reduce the numbers, but it's too damned late. That's another ruse by you and your government—to say you're going to reduce the numbers—and it's not going to make a damned bit of difference.

So now you're going to throw more money at it. That's all you do—make these false promises, like reducing electricity by $275 a year. Well, tell the poor people out there who've got increased electricity prices. What's that done for them? Absolutely nothing. I've never seen such a hopeless government, with ministers that are so incompetent, as this government is. Absolutely hopeless! You have not put thought into it.

To be a member of parliament, you have to have a vision for the future. You shouldn't lie to the Australian people. You shouldn't give them false promises that you can't see through, because you are purely buying their vote. That's all you're doing now and up until the next election; you're just trying to get the confidence of the people by saying, 'We're going to do this,' and 'We're going to give you that.' You've given them absolutely nothing but false hope, false lies—that's all this government has done. And you're going to continue down that path.

But I am proud of the people in this chamber—the coalition, the crossbench and the Greens—who have not backed your policy. We may disagree on certain parts of this policy, but the whole fact is that we have seen through this. To the people who are watching this, all the people in the chamber, up in the gallery: you must understand that most of this whole chamber has voted against this bill because it is not right for the Australian people; it is all based on lies and false promises that they will never deliver to the Australian people, and it's a waste of taxpayers' dollars.

When you show some real strength in this country by knocking back the immigration numbers that are coming into this country and taking up the housing that belongs to Australians; when you work with the councils and state governments to release more land for the building of homes; when you put money into some of these council areas or into these smaller communities so that they can actually have the water supply and sewerage infrastructure they need, because they're the ones who are struggling and can't provide the infrastructure that they need to open up land for more housing; when you put out more apprenticeship schemes to encourage Australians to get up off their backsides and start working, instead of paying them the welfare payment for doing nothing, then we might be able to address the real problems that are affecting Australians. It's about getting workers, here, in Australia, working to provide the housing and the infrastructure.

And, of course, your forestry—that's another thing. You're shutting down the plantations to build your wind turbines. We're not going to have the timber that we need, that we rely on to build the housing as well.

You are so far behind the eight ball. You're absolutely hopeless. I will not support this bill, based on the fact that it's a dog of a bill; it won't do anything. And it's not because I don't care about the Australian people. It's because you haven't got it right.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This bill, the Help to Buy Bill 2023, epitomises everything that's been wrong with government policy over the last 40 years, and that is, effectively, governments have privatised all the public assets and now they want to nationalise all the private assets. The whole point of government is to build infrastructure that provides essential services and have that infrastructure generating recurring revenue to pay for the recurring costs of schools and hospitals. But we are now going to risk $10 billion of taxpayers' money to build 30,000 houses over five years, or 6,000 houses a year. When you have an immigration rate of over half a million people a year, how hard would it have been to just lower the immigration rate by 10,000 or 15,000 people? There's your problem solved; you don't even need to look at putting $10 billion on the line.

But I do want to talk on a couple of other things when it comes to the cost of housing. In particular—and it is going to be one of the policies that I put forward—we need to abolish the CGT discount of 50 per cent on shares and houses. That costs the budget $20 billion a year, and it would fund, for 10 million workers, a tax cut from 30 cents to 20 cents between $45,000 and $65,000. I don't agree with abolishing negative gearing, because people do lose money in the genuine remit of trying to generate income, and you've got to have that nexus between incurring an expense and trying to produce assessable income.

One of the things that I won't have in this debate—and I disagree with One Nation on this—is that somehow we need to encourage more property investment in this country. We have way too much money invested in passive property and rental property. I'm not against owning a second rental home as a bit of a security. By all means, own your own home and one other rental property. But we have some people here who own numerous rental properties. If you've got a couple of million dollars laying around, or $4 million or $5 million, go and build a factory and create some jobs. We need to develop our secondary industries in this country. Our economy is basically houses and holes. We can't continue to rely just on the mining sector, and we can't continue to rely just on the housing sector. It is a Ponzi scheme.

It basically started in 1985 when Paul Keating introduced CGT into the economy and left houses out. Apart from destroying our live pub sector—Sydney used to be the source of many great rock bands, and it has now turned into a housing conglomerate; all people ever talk about is housing—it inflated the price of houses. In 1985, the four major banks had $8 billion in foreign debt; by 2008, they had $800 billion in foreign debt. Most of that money was lent against housing, and it pushed the price of houses up from four to five times earnings to 12 to 13 times earnings. That in itself then pushed two parents back to work. It meant that we needed child care. It meant we had both parents running around picking kids up, dropping them off et cetera. We had no-one manning the tuckshops at schools.

The second part of that was in 1996, in the late nineties. Howard, on the back of the Ralph review—I think it was that, or the Wallace review; I get confused between those two—basically introduced the 50 per cent CGT discount on assets. He didn't abolish indexation; it's still there, but, of course, most people now use the 50 per cent CGT discount. That again inflated houses way above the rate of wage growth in this country. It's one of the reasons why people struggle to get into the housing market: the tax on active income on a wage is so much higher than it is if you make a capital gain on property. We need to level the playing field here. If you earn $100,000, you should pay the same rate of tax or the same amount of tax, no matter how you earn it. But we have a distortion in this country where people who actually get out of bed, put their nose to the grindstone and actively engage in being productive pay twice the rate of tax as passive investors, and that is completely unsustainable. That is something that I'm looking forward to looking at when we have this review of the tax system in the Economic References Committee. We'll look at this because this is something that has to be dealt with.

The other thing that is leading to housing unaffordability is the fact that 12 per cent of people's income is taken from them and given to someone they've never met. When I say '12 per cent of someone's income', that's 12 per cent of their gross income. For many low-income earners, it's 100 per cent of their savings if not more. For many people who earn less than the cost of living or just on the edge of the cost of living, that 12 per cent of their gross wage is the difference between them earning take-home pay above the cost of living and earning that below the cost of living. That is another reason for the People First policy—we're going to actually lift the tax-free threshold from $18,000 to $40,000 because I think it's completely wrong in this country that people pay income tax below the cost of living. We want to encourage people to get out of bed and put their nose to the grindstone. If these people are getting out of bed and putting their nose to the grindstone rather than sitting at home smoking dope all day, then that's a good thing. The last thing we want to do is to see these people struggle. The best way to encourage them is to give them hope, give them incentive, and there is no better incentive than to own your own home. If you think you can afford a home—I feel sorry for people in the major capitals today, especially Sydney and Melbourne, where the average house price or the median house price is about $1 million. Young children today have just totally lost all hope in ever owning their own home.

It's interesting—I'll tell a personal story. I didn't buy my own house until I was in my mid-30s. Ironically, I met my wife there. That's where I first met my wife, at my housewarming. People often say, 'What comes first, the chicken or the egg?' I say, 'It's neither; it's the nest.' If you've got a good house over your head, you will settle down and start to work hard. Suddenly, you won't go out at five o'clock anymore as you do when you're single in your 20s. If you do have a girlfriend, you don't want to go around and sit on the couch with your two mates with empty pizza boxes strewn all over the floor. It is much better to own your own house. I can tell you from personal experience.

Senator Hanson-Young, you know that's true. So we have to look at making superannuation accessible.

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

We've all been there, Senator Rennick.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, I know. That's true. We have to look at making superannuation accessible. One of the criticisms we hear about letting people access their super is that it will push up house prices. It's true there will be more money to buy houses, but the point is that superannuation, by default, if it's not pushing up house prices, is pushing up the price of shares and therefore making it harder. If you're not on the stock exchange, for example, where most of the money in superannuation is invested, you find it much harder to access capital. So, as for that argument that somehow letting superannuation buy your house is going to push up house prices, I'll turn it around and say that superannuation has been pushing up the stock market for years, making it easier for the big end of town to access cheap capital while small businesses find it harder to access cheap capital. So we've got to think about that.

The other thing I disagree with is that we need more investment in property in Australia. I recommend that everyone listen to a great speech given a few weeks ago by a bloke by the name of Matt Barrie. It's called 'Put another Aussie on the barbie'. As he said, Australia has the second-highest rate of supply of housing in the world. We build more houses per capita than most other countries. While I accept there are problems with council regulation and all that, as there always are lots of problems with regulation, I think the idea that we need to be building more and more houses while we ignore (1) building essential infrastructure that provides essential services and (2) building more manufacturing and developing a manufacturing industry where we add value to our minerals is totally wrong. I think we have too big a housing sector in this country, and it is brought about in part by immigration. Because 30 per cent of Australians aren't born here, you have a massive diversion of resources, and the two big diversions of resources are houses and holes—effectively, mining and housing. That's killing our middle sector, which is manufacturing, and the capacity for people to compete even in our essential services.

I will just refer to one interesting thing from 'Put another Aussie on the barbie': there is a crane index, and Sydney, I think, has the highest number of cranes in the world. Sydney has more cranes than New York, Boston, Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Portland, Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary combined. So we do not have a problem with building houses in this country. What we have is a problem where we are totally focused on building houses and we aren't focused on rewarding the people who actually get out of bed and put their noses to the grindstone. Rather than spending more taxpayer money on building houses when you only have to lower immigration by 10,000 to achieve the same result, we need to lower income tax so that hardworking Australians have more money in their pockets and can save up faster, own their own houses and actually learn to settle down and have a sense of purpose in their lives.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My notes say that I should thank senators for their contribution to the debate on the Help to Buy Bill 2023 and the Help to Buy (Consequential Provisions) Bill 2023. What we are seeing in the chamber this evening is a full expression of the lack of a sense of focus on the interests of real Australians from the Greens party, members of the crossbench and the Liberal and National parties. We just heard from Senator Rennick, Mr Dutton's preferred candidate for the Queensland Senate ticket. He sits on the crossbench now, but, in an expression of Mr Dutton's political extremism, Senator Rennick was his preferred candidate on the Queensland Liberal National Party ticket.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Rennick, a point of order?

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, on relevance to the topic here. This has got nothing to do with housing. It's a personal smear that's got nothing to do with the topic, and it would be nice for Senator Ayres, once in his life, to stop attacking personalities and stick to the issue and the substance of the bill.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I understand the substance of your point of order. It's late in the evening. Senator Ayres, I ask you to reflect and to restrain yourself.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What I will point out is that that contribution is not very far away from the Greens political party contribution. It makes as much sense. It goes to the same issues—a sort of extremism of Left and Right that joins together, as always, in a position that frustrates the ambitions of ordinary Australians. There isn't much difference between the contributions of Senator McKim in this place or Mr Chandler-Mather in the House of Representatives and what Senator Rennick just said. It's the same strange, weird economics that drives the position.

The problem is that if this bill is frustrated in the Senate, who loses? Well, 40,000 ordinary Australians lose—low- and middle-income Australians; nurses, teachers, tradies, truckies, early childhood education workers, care workers, disability workers. Forty thousand Australians will miss out on the opportunity for the government to support them to own a home.

There are all sorts of wild things being said in the debate about the government's broader agenda in housing. But, at its heart, this proposition is a modest proposition that would support 40,000 Australians putting a roof over their head and giving their partner and their children some security. It would give them security and certainty to build equity over time and, despite all of the things that have been said here, for most of them it will give them 100 per cent ownership of their own home. The silliness of this debate—the fake conviviality; the pats on the back between the Greens political party, the extreme right and Peter Dutton's Liberal-National party; the glee with which they approach this most juvenile of political victories—creates the problem that the 40,000 people who miss out are nurses, teachers et cetera. They're people that these senators will never meet. They're people who will miss out in suburban Australia and in regional towns. They will miss out.

If you're trying to get on the ladder and could have benefited from this scheme—if you're a nurse or a teacher or you work in the police force or the fire brigade and you can't get a home; if you're working your guts out and this shared-equity scheme would have supported you—then I will be really clear: blame the Greens political party, the Liberal and National parties and the extreme right of Australian politics, who are all in this together and who make as much sense as each other. They focus on the partisan interest rather than the Australian interest, because that's all they care about.

This is juvenile student politics. If you want to participate in student politics, that's a good thing. There are plenty of mature age students out there. Enrol in a course and go hang out. What has been advanced in here in terms of opposition to this bill is not serious. It's not serious; it's not real. But who suffers? Ordinary Australians do. When you listen to some of the speeches in opposition to this bill—and, again, I'll focus on Senator Rennick because my memory only reaches that far back. Senator Rennick said that he wants Australians to jump out of bed, get their nose to the grindstone and work harder. Well, I think Australians do work hard. The Albanese government thinks Australians do work hard.

The truth is that there are nearly a million more Australians in work because of this government. Australians are working more hours. There are more hours of work available to people. They are earning more and, because of our tax cuts, keeping more of what they earn, but they need support. We're on their side. So, if you're in one of those low- and middle-income occupations, in the community sector, in the caring professions, in the police, in the fire brigade, and you cannot get the equity together to purchase a home, the Albanese government's Help to Buy scheme is there to support you.

If the Help to Buy scheme is voted against tonight and tomorrow, the reason that it's not available for you is that Mr Dutton, Mr Littleproud, Mr Bandt and Mr Chandler-Mather all decided you weren't worth it. What was more important was their opportunity to run the crassest, lowest form of political argument. What Mr Dutton has tried to do is to eke out incremental political victories by trying to make Australians lose. If you lose in the battle to buy a new home, it's a victory for Mr Chandler-Mather and Senator McKim—and it's a victory for Mr Dutton. They love failure because that's their political message. The bitterness and venality of that approach and lack of interest in ordinary Australians is all they have.

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

Tell us about the bill.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll tell you about the bill, Senator Ruston. The bill would mean that 40,000 Australians would have the government supporting them in a shared-equity approach that you know would make a difference.

Of course, Senator Ruston says that she wants to own her own home—good. Australians should own their own homes. They should. But some of us need support. While the government is working hard in the long term with the property sector to build more homes against the opposition largely from our opponents in the Greens political party, who haven't seen a housing development that they support, 40,000 people would get an opportunity to be supported by the government to get shared equity.

A set of consequential amendments sit with the bill, which will provide Housing Australia with the powers to administer the Help to Buy scheme on behalf of the Commonwealth. Something was made of this during the debate about what those amendments mean. They would mean they seek to support the concurrent operation of Commonwealth and state and territory laws. They will enable the states to preserve the operation of their laws while also providing key protections for the Commonwealth to ensure the effective operation of Help to Buy. That approach of working together with the states, rather than what the Morrison government did, which was never meet with the states and then blame-shift to the states, is in complete contradistinction to what the Albanese government is doing here in partnership with the states.

Once the bill is passed, as I said, 40,000 low- and middle-income Australian households will be able to access homeownership with smaller mortgages, lower deposits and more-affordable repayments. How could any person oppose a nurse who can't get the capital together but could, with the government's support, be able to purchase their own home and have smaller repayments? Why on earth would anybody stand in the way of that? But you are, because of venal, partisan self-interest. Help to Buy will help ordinary people get into and stay in their own homes. We support them. The Liberal and National parties can't wait to undermine their opportunity to get into ordinary housing.

The bills represent just a small part of what is a $32 billion agenda in housing. It is the biggest agenda from any government in living memory. It is an ambitious housing agenda that will make a difference. It will make a difference for ordinary people who want to buy homes and need more housing supply. The government is putting its shoulder behind the wheel and not engaging in Trotskyite student politics like those that Senator McKim engages in. He engages in Trotskyite student politics instead of action. What we have done for renters, who Senator McKim pretends to be interested in, is the biggest jump in Commonwealth rental support that there has ever been.

The dishonest campaign about this from Senator McKim and his colleagues in the Greens will go on and on and on, but I tell you what: a meme or a social media post has never built a single home, helped a person buy a home or helped a person to get more affordable rent. What the government's broader approach will do is to mean more homes are built, more homes are funded through the states and more homes are available for low- and middle-income earners. Of course, this will never trouble any of the people in here, who—without making assumptions about where people's personal circumstances are—all have secure homes. But it's going to make a big difference. These bills—focusing on the narrow circumstances of what these bills would achieve—would mean that 40,000 people's lives would be changed, and that's not good enough for you. You'd rather have zero than 40,000 people's lives changed for the better.

All sorts of claims have been made—claims that it would have an inflationary impact. This is something in common between Senator McKim and Senator Bragg, It's just nonsense. It is not supported by any sensible economic analysis. The idea that this number of homes would have that kind of impact is wrong. All it would do is mean that low- and middle-income earners get a decent shake out of the housing system. I'm proud of these pieces of legislation. I urge senators to actually think about the faces behind the scheme—the people. If you can go down to the supermarket and look in the faces of nurses and teachers who can't afford homes, you've got less concern for the interests of ordinary Australians than I thought you did. I urge the Senate to support the bills.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I alert senators that we've passed the time for divisions, but I put the question on the second reading amendment standing in the name of Senator Faruqi.

Question negatived.

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

by leave—I ask that the Australian Greens' support for that second reading amendment in Senator Faruqi's name be recorded.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It will be noted.

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

I move the second reading amendment standing in my name:

Omit all words after "That", substitute:

(a) further consideration of the bills be postponed until Tuesday, 26 November 2024; and

(b) on Tuesday, 26 November 2024:

(i) the bills be called on prior to the first order of government business,

(ii) the questions on all remaining stages of the bills be put at 1 pm,

(iii) divisions may take place between 1.30 pm and 2 pm until consideration of the bills has concluded, and

(iv) paragraph (b)(ii) operate as a limitation of debate under standing order 142.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I put the question on the second reading amendment standing in the name of Senator McKim. A division is required. That is deferred until tomorrow.

Debate adjourned.