Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this opportunity to speak on the member's motion on homelessness. One of the biggest factors affecting homelessness in Australia is the issue of housing affordability. A good place to start, to see where we are today, is to go back to 'The Forgotten People' speech of Sir Robert Menzies back in 1942. Menzies said:

The material home represents the concrete expression of saving 'for a home of our own'. Your advanced socialists may rage against private property (even whilst they acquire it); but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours, to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will.

We understood the social and economic importance of home ownership. In the 1950s, around 50 per cent of the Australian population owned their own home. But in the 1960s and 1970s, because we understood the importance of home ownership, that numbers increased to 70 per cent and stayed there for around 20 years. In fact, in 1981, we got to almost 74 per cent of people owning their own homes in this country.

But since then we have gone backwards. From the high of 73.4 per cent, today we are down at just 64 per cent of Australians owning their own home. That is a nine per cent fall over the last couple of decades. That means around 900,000 Australians now rent a place and do not own their own house. If you drill down into those numbers, the facts are even worse for people aged 45 to 54. Their numbers have fallen even further. Their numbers have fallen 15 per cent in terms of home ownership. Of course, even for those with a home, a far greater percentage have a mortgage and owe more on their mortgage.

Why have we got ourselves into this problem? It has not been the cost of housing construction. Where the free market has been allowed to work in housing construction, entrepreneurs have worked out how to build things more cheaply, how to make things more cheaply and how to make furniture more cheaply. But we have had government interference in the market, limiting the supply of new land releases, which has caused an increase in housing prices. The complete absurdity of the situation! There are around nine million households in Australia. If we wanted to, we could depopulate the mainland, move every household to Tasmania, give each household a one acre block and still have almost half of Tasmania left aside for national parks.

In our country, with our landmass, the fall in housing affordability and increase in housing prices is a complete crime against our younger generation. And it has been done for failed ideas—the idea that it is somehow better that we congest our cities, crowd everyone into them and pack them into high-rise apartments. In fact, there was a great report several years ago called Children in the Compact Citythat showed the detrimental effects on children living in high-rise apartments. Studies have shown that you actually use more energy, more electricity, living in a high-rise apartment than you do in a detached house.

We need to go back to those principles that we had in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and put housing affordability back on the priority list. The Treasurer has been misquoted, but if we look at his comments, he is right. He said we need to build, build, build. That is exactly what we need to do. We need to ensure that we are releasing land in this country and that there are jobs in our regional centres by moving government departments to our regional centres. We need to look at stamp duty—the absurdity that, in Sydney today, if you want to move from, say, the Sutherland Shire to the northern suburbs, you will pay stamp duty of around $35,000. That is a $35,000 tax on someone who wants to move internally. That has gross economic effects on the nation. Also what we need to do is ensure that we get the housing supply back, because that is what will affect housing affordability. If we can get housing affordability for our younger generation, that is the best way that we can also affect homelessness.

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