Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

It was opposed by the opposition, I am well reminded, thank you—by the opposition of the day, the current government. We have fought to protect superannuation ever since, and here we are once again defending Australia's great superannuation system against a government that really doesn't have great affection for it. They have slowed down the increase in contributions. Contributions should have been going up by 9½ or 10 per cent. They have now slowed that down, or paused that. And here the government are now suggesting that people should be able to dip into their super to buy a home. What that does is two things. It increases demand. Fighting accelerating prices with another tax concession would be risky at any time, but actually allowing people to dip into their super—which in later years will reduce their retirement savings—is foolish. It pushes the problem further down the road. We oppose it.

The second measure is one we would be willing to talk about, which is about allowing seniors to use the proceeds in relation to the sale of their main residence to make contributions of up to $300,000 to their superannuation provider, provided they're over 65 years of age. We'd be prepared to talk about that because we actually introduced a pilot scheme that allowed seniors to downsize, when we were in government just over four years ago. The government that was elected under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott scrapped that. Here they are back again with an idea that is similar—not the same. We don't believe it's as effective, but we would be prepared to talk about it if the government was prepared to separate these two measures rather than bundle them together, because we will not support allowing people to dip into their superannuation for the purchase of a property.

I know that, on the government side, they think it's a good idea, because they believe that the deposit is the problem. I want to talk through some of the figures for Parramatta, just to try to point out to them exactly how out of touch they are. In Parramatta the median price for a home has now reached $1.2 million. Parramatta is the heart of Sydney. It's the middle of the west. The median rent is now over $500 a week, and the growth has been 17.3 per cent. That means that every year the increase in the value of a property is $21,675, which means that, if you are saving for a deposit, for every year of the price increase of the house, you need an extra $4,335 on the deposit you were saving for. Not only are we talking about $240,000 for a deposit of 20 per cent for the median house in Parramatta but we're also talking about that deposit going up by nearly $4,500 every year, because of the increase in prices. Parramatta is not a particularly poor area. Only 15 per cent of the population in my electorate are in a low-socioeconomic group. Very few people in Parramatta can afford the median house price of $1.2 million, particularly those that work there. Over 80 per cent of people that work in Parramatta come in from elsewhere. They come in from an hour further out to work in Parramatta—incredible distances to travel to work.

I want to stop there and talk a little bit about why housing affordability matters. It's not just about owning a house or security in retirement. I don't want to talk about the good old days, but there were aspects in past decades which produced benefits for a community and which we're losing because of changes in the way our communities operate. Back in the days when we had full-time work, large companies that employed large numbers of people in a community, local media and local ways of meeting with each other, and people lived and worked in the same suburb that their parents lived and worked in, there was a baby in that bath. We've lost the bath in many ways, but the baby was the social cohesion. People knew their community well. They lived near their parents. They lived near their grandparents. They knew the parents of the kids that went to school with their children. They knew each other. They met after work. They built relationships which supported families through good and bad times. When a partner went back to work, people in the area assisted with looking after the kids. There was a cohesion.

Small country towns still have it. In a few suburbs of Sydney occasionally you'll find small pockets where it still exists, largely because those pockets didn't boom and are still as they were. As the boom times came through, the price of housing went up so much and people had to live further and further away from their parents and where they worked, we lost this important cohesion. When we talk about housing affordability, we're not just talking about people buying a house 1½ hours away from where they work or from their family; we're talking about having communities in which people can live and work in the same communities, close to their family support structures. If you do that, a whole range of other social issues are alleviated by the community connections that protect people in their worst of times. The neighbour that has lived beside you for 50 years is there for you when you're 85. Again, I've seen even unit blocks where the residents have been consistent over time and where, as people age in place, there are support systems for them. If we don't deal with housing affordability in a very real way, not just in the ability to buy a house but in the ability to buy a house in a community in which you live and work, then we are losing the important part of home ownership, which is that baby: the social cohesion, the connection you get when a community works very well.

It is incredibly important that we have this discussion, and it's a great shame to me that, on the other side, this government walked away from so many of Labor's policies when they first came to government. We knew that housing affordability was a problem, as this government should have on the first day they were elected. They should have known about it in opposition and should have watched the policies we had. They did watch them, but when they came in they scrapped them. We had the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which has been praised by many in the community for doing incredibly good work in Parramatta. It provided $622 million over four years from 2008-09 for the development of up to 50,000 affordable rental properties by mid-2012. It was to deliver an additional 50,000 properties onwards, but, of course, it was scrapped. We produced The road home white paper on homelessness and developed national strategies and targets to reduce homelessness. We committed to the Housing Help for Seniors pilot, which was an earlier version of the second part of this bill—scrapped, of course, by the Abbott government. We provided $6 billion to the states and territories for affordable housing. Those who live in areas like mine will have seen the building that went on in those years of new housing stock. We negotiated the National Partnership on Homelessness, which saw the Australian state and territory governments provide over $1 billion for reducing homelessness. We established the National Housing Supply Council—of course, scrapped. We appointed a dedicated minister for housing and homelessness—again, scrapped and not replaced when this government was elected over four years ago.

So the work that was being done in the housing space was undone and then we had four years of nothing and, in fact, denial that it was a problem. The government said it was a problem of a deposit and young people should borrow it from their parents. They ignored this massive—over 17 per cent—rise in housing prices in my community every year. They ignored the absurdity of a person on a median wage being able to buy a median house at $1.2 million. Who is buying them? I don't know. But certainly nobody on the median wage, which sits at $60,000 a year, is buying properties like that. No, they're not. And those who are buying properties are at great risk of interest rate rises. We've heard that recently from the Governor of the Reserve Bank also.

We've had a government that's basically cut what was happening and has done very little or nothing in the meantime and has now come up with something that is really quite ineffective at best and, to be honest, damaging. Recently the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute published a review that found:

… there is almost no effort within high-level policy thinking at the federal level that is dedicated to constructing and articulating a systematic conceptual understanding of the links between housing policy objectives, housing policy instruments and mechanisms, and their effect on the economics of housing systems or economic productivity.

That is really a damning indictment of a government that's been in power now for four years on an issue that was absolutely obvious when we were in government, which is why we acted on it—to get into government and ignore something this basic in the community! You can't go to a shopping centre or a school or anywhere without finding a parent who will tell you how scared they are that their children will not be able to buy a home or are talking about how they dipped into their retirement savings to provide that possibility for their children, which means, by the way, that as those parents reach retirement age it's more likely the taxpayer will be subsidising their retirement than we would be if housing affordability were not such a major issue.

In the couple of minutes I have left, I want to talk about Labor's policy. Before the last election we announced that we would act on negative gearing on new stock. You only have to go to an auction and look at what's happening in areas like Parramatta, where there is so much building going on, to see that the new properties coming onto the market are almost exclusively going to investors. You can see the prices going up and up. You can see properties that are specifically built for investors. They're built for the return. They're built to be negatively geared. They're built for the tax-advantage system we have. And we're not seeing properties coming on to the market in areas like Parramatta that are designed and built for people on the median wage or even twice the median wage. We're just not seeing it.

We know that, in order to slow down the speed of the price rises in housing in areas like Sydney, we need to tackle the tax concessions that are turbocharging the housing market, that are driving the massive increases that are putting the price of housing out of the reach of average Australians week after week after week. We need to tackle negative gearing and we need to tackle the concessions on capital gains tax. If at any time in the foreseeable future we want people on the median wage or even double the median wage to be able to afford to buy houses close to where they work and close to where their parents are in our major capital cities, we have to act on those levers because they are putting housing affordability out of the reach of most Australians and every month this government delays on acting on that they make the situation worse. This bill is at best a fig leaf. Housing affordability really matters and this bill will only make the situation worse.

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