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

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

That the Senate take note of the documents.

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

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

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

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

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

You didn't build any. You didn't build any homes.

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

He's very sensitive about this, isn't he?

We've gone from almost 200,000 houses built in Australia per year under the coalition to 170,000 on average under this government. Despite all the huffing and puffing, the bureaucracies, the Housing Australia Future Fund and all the other garbage policies of this government, this government has built bureaucracies and not houses. That is the reality. The government is embarrassed, and Senator Ayres is embarrassed. I'm sorry that he's embarrassed, but the numbers don't lie. We are down to 170,000 on average, and we need a quarter of a million.

Housing construction has collapsed, and then we have the issue of the never-ending deposit time extending and extending. Under this government, most Australians will now have to wait another 14 months until they get a deposit. Depressing, isn't it? Then, to make matters worse, Labor's solution, Help to Buy, won't get you a house in almost every capital city. In fact, in my home state, just 14 per cent of houses in Sydney are eligible for this scheme, and only six per cent are eligible in Western Australia. So it's quite depressing.

I'll say, before wrapping up and giving other people a chance to say something, my main point is that advancing an agenda around giving a tax cut to foreign asset managers is a warped priority. I think, when the government are able to look at this in the cold light of day, they will also admit that they would have been better off working on trying to get houses built and trying to help people bridge the deposit gap rather than running the government in favour of their favourite vested interests—which, generally speaking, are the super funds. But, in this case, they have been trying to tilt the scales in favour of foreign asset managers and foreign sovereign wealth funds by allowing them to become the perpetual landlords to Australians. Most Australians would say that is a sick distortion of the Australian dream, and this is why housing is in such a terrible mess under this government.

Question agreed to.