Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I listen to the member for Fadden, I am reminded of a young fellow who played football with me once: he was not sure which team he was going to support, which jersey he was going to put on and in which direction he was going to run. I am looking forward to the member for Fadden actually casting a vote on this issue because all I heard was negativity, rhetoric and opposition. One wonders how he would go, and how much he would wax lyrical, if he truly believed in the legislation he was going to support in this House. This is great legislation, and it is part of a great scheme which will help the people in my electorate tremendously. I support the First Home Saver Accounts (Further Provisions) Amendment Bill 2008 and the First Home Saver Account Providers Supervisory Levy Imposition Bill 2008.

During the 2007 election, and when I ran in the 2004 election, people spoke to me on numerous occasions about housing affordability. Growing up in Ipswich, I know how important housing affordability is to the local residents. Ipswich was a depressed area for a long time. It went through some very difficult and dark days, particularly in the 1980s, when industry was fleeing, when railway workshops were closing down and when coalmines were closing down—when it just seemed everything was going badly for Ipswich. Fortunately, in the last 10 to 15 years things have turned around. With the injection of money from the Rudd Labor government, with great foresight from the Ipswich City Council and with an integrated strategy from the much-maligned Queensland government—as my friend the member for Fadden would say—we are seeing a great rebirth in Ipswich. The First Home Saver Accounts scheme in this legislation will help enormously those battling people in my area who have struggled with housing affordability for so long.

What we have seen in the last few years in the federal electorate of Blair—in Laidley, just west of Ipswich, in Gatton as well, in the old Boonah shire and in Ipswich in particular—is a growth in population. Ipswich is now 155,000 people. It grew by 5,000 last year—4.6 per cent growth per annum. Just over a week ago Ipswich was recognised as the fastest-growing region in South-East Queensland. The Lockyer Valley, which makes up 25 per cent of the population of my electorate, is also growing. We are seeing housing estates grow up everywhere. Just recently the Queensland Times reported that one developer was building 1,400 new homes in the most eastern part of my electorate at Redbank Plains. So housing affordability is high on the agenda for the people of Blair.

We have seen, for example, a new prison being built in Gatton, meaning thousands more jobs. The Woodlands estate is going to double the size of Gatton township, which is an important regional hub in South-East Queensland. Young people and older people who do not own their homes, who want to get into the market and who are struggling with rising rents are looking for some break, for some opportunity and for some help. Under repeated interest rises under the previous government they got none. Instead, what they got was effectively an attack on their wages and conditions with Work Choices. Those people know that under the Rudd Labor government help is at hand, and it is coming in the First Home Saver Accounts scheme.

It is interesting that just south of my house in Ripley Valley there are 100 square kilometres which will house 120,000 people in about 50,000 dwellings in the next 20 years. The Ripley Valley master plan task force—established in partnership with the local community, Ipswich City Council and the state government—is quite incredible. Ipswich will grow by 205 per cent by 2031, according to the latest data. One can see that, for the people who live in the Ipswich area, assistance in the form of first home saver accounts is immeasurably important. We will see a lot more development as a result of the housing in the area. Ipswich has 43 per cent of all available industrial land in South-East Queensland. There are two universities and the RAAF base at Amberley, which is becoming a super base. So there will be more and more jobs and more and more people. Beside Flinders View, where I live at Ipswich, there are hundreds more houses being built. The RAAF base, which currently has 2,500 personnel on it, will have 3,200 by 2009. By 2015 it will have 4,000. You can imagine the housing boom in my area—it is quite extraordinary. The Rudd Labor government’s commitment to first home saver accounts is so important for my electorate.

The First Home Saver Accounts Bill 2008 was passed earlier this year. That primary legislation is being amended by this bill. I remember campaigning on this legislation and on this issue in the federal campaign. I was extraordinarily pleased when, on 4 November 2007, it was announced by the then Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, housing spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, and shadow Treasurer, Wayne Swan, that a Rudd Labor government would help aspiring first home buyers in my electorate to save for a deposit. My dad was a cleaner in the meatworks and my mum was a shop assistant. The idea of owning a home was so important to them in the 1960s in Ipswich. So many people could not afford it. I grew up in a working-class family who struggled all their lives. This sort of measure really helps and it irks me to see the member for Fadden criticising the federal government for this sort of measure—blaming the states, blaming everything under the sun. The Howard government had nearly 12 years to do something like this and they did not do it in all the years they were in office. It has been left to the Rudd Labor government, as has so much in law reform, in health and savings policies, in helping the workforce and workplaces, in helping the skills crisis and in structural redevelopment, to do the hard yards.

This particular legislation helps to overcome the greatest obstacle to buying a first home and that is simply saving for a deposit. It is hard when every week you have to look at the pennies—if you cannot buy football shoes for your kids, if you cannot afford to buy textbooks and if you have to choose the kind of food that is eaten. I remember when I was growing up having to eat certain foods because my folks could not afford to buy other types of food. They could not afford dental care and health care. This sort of legislation, this sort of scheme, will help kids who, like me, grew up in working-class families to get the kind of assistance they need to get decent housing.

The first home saver accounts will build on arrangements for superannuation—and superannuation is another great Labor initiative. We have a superannuation industry in this country because of the Hawke-Keating Labor government, and we should never forget it. We should never forget the fact that it was a Labor government that increased pensions. It was Bill Hayden, when he was the social security minister, who increased the pension from 19 per cent to 25 per cent of the average weekly wage. Was that percentage increased under the Howard government? Was it even looked at? No. Issues like this, issues like housing affordability, were not looked at. What did they do? They tried to privatise everything. They deliberately ran down the stock of public housing. That is what they did. They made housing affordability more difficult, but under the Rudd Labor government we will look at helping in terms of housing affordability.

I will tell you something: the Howard government really have form when it comes to housing affordability. Listen to these facts—these are the official statistics in relation to housing affordability. The average home now costs about seven times the annual average wage. That is up four times in just 10 years of the Howard government. In 1996 housing affordability was about four times the average salary and now it is seven times the average salary. Nationally, in 2007, first home buyers were spending 31.7 per cent of their total income on mortgage payments, up from 17.9 per cent in 1996. The proportion of homes being bought by first home owners declined from 21.8 per cent in June 1996 to 17.1 per cent at the time of the election of the Rudd Labor government. So let us not have the opposition spokesman come into this House and lecture us about housing affordability, because they did nothing about it for about 12 years.

It is the Rudd Labor government that will increase the housing supply by providing incentives for local infrastructure and giving state and local governments incentives to lower development charges through our Housing Affordability Fund. We are the ones who are bringing in the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which will provide investors with tax incentives to increase the supply of new, affordable rental properties across Australia, saving 50,000 low- to middle-income families 20 per cent on their rental bills, and I commend Minister for Housing for the initiative.

These particular bills before the House talk about a number of things, and I will go through them in detail. They include a system for handling unclaimed moneys, amendments to secrecy and information sharing between the ATO, APRA and ASIC, dealing with family law proceedings, and various amendments to make the scheme operational. The government is investing $1.2 billion over four years in the First Home Saver Account policy. As I say, it is part of our financial support to boost the housing stock of this country and to help people. The amendments made in these bills ensure secrecy provisions in the First Home Saver Accounts Act and enable APRA and ASIC to access required information while maintaining and protecting people’s privacy. APRA and ASIC each play a role in the administration of the First Home Saver Accounts Act and they will receive that sort of information in the course of performing their functions. This amendment bill will provide that the information they receive will have the same protection as the governing legislation under which they operate.

The bill will also provide for a system for implementing and dealing with unclaimed moneys, just like other investments but not superannuation. Where first home saver accounts have been inactive for seven years and where the provider is incapable of locating the account holder, that money will pass to the Commonwealth via ASIC. Effectively it becomes bona vacantia, as we say in law. If those individual account holders come forward, if they are found, they can claim their entitlement to that money. Under the legislation, ASIC will publish information about unclaimed money to permit people to search for their unclaimed money and they can then ask to be paid by ASIC.

In respect of the family law proceedings I referred to, there is an amendment to permit parties to access information about their former partner’s first home saver accounts without the need for recourse to litigation. In December 2002, in a bipartisan way, legislation was passed in relation to family law proceedings so that parties to family law disputes could have access to information about the balance of superannuation accounts, effectively bringing in a super-splitting arrangement that could be undertaken by way of a binding financial agreement or by way of a court order. In those circumstances, parties could then get a split of the superannuation and it could be done in a way that was fair and equitable to all concerned. Previously, superannuation was only treated as a financial resource and not capable of being split. So the amendments in these particular bills ensure that first home saver accounts are treated the same way as superannuation for family law purposes. Effectively, what will happen is that there can be a split of the first home saver accounts in the same way. And there is protection, of course, for the providers in those circumstances because, just like there was protection for the trustees of the superannuation funds, there needs to be protection for the holders of the scheme.

There are numerous credit unions and cooperatives which have signed up to this scheme. I am not going to name them all. I note that the member for Fadden mentioned a number of them. I just want to talk about a couple of key features of this particular scheme, which will help my electorate so much. The federal government will provide a 17 per cent matching contribution on personal contributions up to $5,000 a year—that is, an annual maximum of $850. Account holders must save for part of four financial years. Account holders must contribute from after-tax salary. Government contributions and withdrawals are not taxed and earnings in the accounts are taxed like superannuation at 15 per cent. Accounts can be provided by banks, superannuation funds, building societies and like institutions.

I am very pleased to speak on this bill because it will make an appreciable difference to the lives of my constituents. It will help give struggling families in Ipswich, the Lockyer Valley and the old Boonah shire the capacity to save for a deposit. It will give them a start in life. It is a socially just and equitable measure. It is all about the Rudd Labor government giving people a hand up, giving them the kind of help and assistance they deserve. It is about a fairer Australia, a just Australia, a decent Australia, and I commend the bill to the House.

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