Louise Markus (Greenway, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to address an issue of great importance to the people of New South Wales and indeed to my electorate of Greenway. The New South Wales state Labor government presides over the highest amount of taxes and charges levied on the cost of a new home and the largest shortfall of broad hectare land release provision of any state or territory.

Let me remind the members opposite, and particularly the member for Prospect, how the fall in house prices actually came about in New South Wales. Let me remind him about the introduction of vendor tax, the increase in land tax and the policy decisions of the state Labor government that have impacted on the price of housing in New South Wales and particularly Western Sydney. Let me remind the member for Prospect that investors are fleeing the state of New South Wales for other states because they know there is a better tax environment in those states.

These two issues which I will talk about today, and which this motion addresses, are paramount in placing the Australian dream of homeownership out of the reach of New South Wales families and individuals. The number of new lots released in New South Wales 15 years ago was 7,931. Last year it was only 2,780, which is a 65 per cent decrease. The member for Prospect wants to debate ideas, but has he checked his facts? Is he talking about solutions? The average lot size in New South Wales 15 years agounder Liberal Premier Nick Greiner, may I add—was 600 square metres. Last year it was 450 square metres, a 25 per cent decrease. The average price for a lot in New South Wales 15 years ago was $75,000; last year it was $310,000—a 400 per cent increase. The New South Wales state taxes and charges and the large shortfall in the release of broad hectare land are instrumental factors in that unnerving statistical picture.

I will first address the burdening taxation and regulation placed on new home buyers by the state Labor  government. At their core, New South Wales land and property taxes are restrictive and inequitable. It has become more difficult to enter the property market in New South Wales and families and individuals have been driven out of the state to more tax-friendly environments. In New South Wales, state government related taxes, fees, levies and compliance costs have increased over $100,000 in the last five years—unequivocally the highest increase of all states. These costs are often more than the cost of the land on which the house sits.

Local infrastructure levies applied to new home buyers are now levied at a rate far in excess of the actual cost of essential housing infrastructure, such as water and sewerage. In Sydney, total levies now amount to $68,233, where the actual cost of the infrastructure is estimated at only $1,752. Environmental compliance costs have also added to the costs of new housing for little measurable ecological benefits. New housing accounts for only two per cent of the total housing stock, but it is bearing close to 100 per cent of the compliance burden. As I have mentioned in this chamber previously, vendor tax is purely a structural tax, and it is a tax of paradoxes. When it was introduced to New South Wales, it was estimated to raise $690 million a year as well as to act as a disincentive to buy and sell property. This was supposed to help ease the pressure on the property market, but, in the following financial year, the tax was estimated to have raised only $367 million.

I will share an example of the state Labor government’s mismanagement of land provision. In 1998, the New South Wales Department of Planning identified over 29,000 home sites that could be developed adjacent to the Richmond railway line, but the state Labor government has not yet taken any action towards developing them. Many hundreds of families could walk to an existing railway station. This region has been sidelined for 10 years so far in favour of other developments where there is no such existing infrastructure—in fact, a railway has to be built at great cost to service the north-west sector. When will this happen? Ten years? Twenty years? I suspect never.

Housing Industry Australia’s Executive Director, Chris Lamont, last week said in one of our local community newspapers:

It is simply too easy to blame interest rates and heightened consumer demand for the housing affordability crisis. The cause of the problem lies in an undersupply of ready-to-develop land, the multiple planning hoops developers must jump through in order to get a building completed, and the fact that State and Local Governments—

particularly the state Labor government in New South Wales—

regard housing as a cash cow to be milked to underwrite their budgets.”

Due to this overtaxing by the state and the mismanagement of broad hectare land release, the federal government has stepped in to give a significant helping hand to those Australians trying to purchase their first home. The federal government’s First Home Owners Scheme has provided over 926,000 grants to families and individuals to assist them to purchase their own homes. The federal government has committed $4.75 billion over five years to the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement to provide funding to assist those whose needs for appropriate housing cannot be met by the private market. (Time expired)

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