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

I'm pleased to rise this evening to speak on the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation Amendment Bill 2018. When not just we on this side of the House—not just Liberals, not just Nationals—but all Australians want some guidance on where we should be on a particular issue, there is no better place to go back to than what is known as the 'forgotten people' speech by Sir Robert Menzies. What did Menzies say about the importance of housing in that speech? He talked about homes material, homes human and homes spiritual. He said:

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.

He continued:

I have mentioned homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual. Let me take them in their order.

And Menzies went on to talk about 'homes material'. He said:

The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own". Your advanced socialist may rage against private property even while he acquires 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.

If you consider it, you will see that if, as in the old saying, "the Englishman's home is his castle", it is this very fact that leads on to the conclusion that he who seeks to violate that law by violating the soil of England must be repelled and defeated.

Menzies was exactly right. And, from his generation, we saw the greatest increase in home ownership our nation had seen. Yet, over the last decade, unfortunately, politicians in this place and in our state chambers and in our local governments have let our nation down. They have put artificial restrictions on the number of houses available with restricted zoning laws, and we haven't had enough homes being built in this nation compared to our increase in population, and that has pushed the price of houses up to where many in our nation—many young people—have simply said, 'Bugger it.' They've said, 'It's simply too hard to save for a home.'

We have to correct this. We have to take every step available to us to correct this. We have to give opportunities to young Australians to own their own homes. That should be one of the central priorities of this parliament, this government and this chamber.

The way to do that is quite simple. We have to go back to the good old-fashioned laws of supply and demand. If we're going to have a migration rate of 100,000, 150,000, 200,000—or even 300,000, which we saw during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years—we've got to make sure that we are building housing stock for the numbers of people who settle in Australia. And we are doing right to try and decentralise some of our migration intake. Yes, I know it's hard, and yes, we have to have jobs out in our country and regional areas. But that's what we must aim for. We have a broad and wide land mass in Australia, and yet we have everyone wanting to congregate in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, or even over in Perth, in high-rise apartments. We are building apartments and putting people in them, lined up like battery hens. It is detrimental to our nation's welfare. It is detrimental to the kids who do not have the opportunity, and the privilege, to run and play in their own backyard.

On this side of the House, we understand those problems and we are sensibly working through them. What do we see on the other side of the chamber? We see typical Labor policy—short-term solutions without looking at the unintended consequences of their policy, and a failure to learn from the mistakes of history. And here we go again. Labor's policy on housing is to have an attack on negative gearing because it sounds evil.

Let's be very clear about what Labor's attack on negative gearing is. Firstly, they try and make out that negative gearing is some dodgy tax deal that people are engaged in. It is a simple principle: if you are investing in an asset to try and create wealth, income and cash flow, your interest expenses are expenses that you can claim as tax deductions. That principle doesn't just apply to housing. It applies to shares, it applies to commercial property, it applies to machinery—it applies to every type of investment class that exists.

But the Labor Party want to deny schoolteachers and firemen and plumbers and small business people and middle-class Australians that opportunity. If you're from the big end of town and you've got your affairs structured through companies, you can of course still negatively gear property under Labor's policy. But, if you are a wage and salary earner, the Labor Party wants to take that opportunity away from you.

What are the effects of this policy? We've seen today modelling from the Master Builders Association. What would the effect of Labor's policy be? It would be 'a fall in new housing construction of up to 42,000 dwellings over five years', with 8,000 fewer houses and 34,000 fewer apartments. That is the consequence of Labor's ill thought out policy. What about the effect of Labor's policy on employment in the housing construction sector? The modelling says there would be 32,000 fewer jobs. That's plumbers, electricians, landscape gardeners, tradesmen, plasterers and bricklayers that rely on housing construction for their income—32,000 fewer jobs in that sector under Labor's policy. It would mean a $1.4 billion contraction in building activity in the first year alone, or a six per cent decline, in my home state of New South Wales.

That is the policy that Labor want to inflict on our housing market. This is happening at a time when the construction cycle is already in a decline. You couldn't pick a worse time to implement this policy. Like the majority of the Labor Party's policies, as we see, it hurts the very people that they think they are helping. We've seen this happen before, back in the 1980s. Labor thought this was a great idea and it could be very popular: 'Let's go after negative gearing.' What does history tell us? We know that, in Sydney, rents went through the roof. People who are renting, trying to save and put some money aside for a deposit, are going to be hit by Labor's policy. They're going to have higher rents to pay.

With that historical evidence, with what we are seeing in the housing cycle today, and with report after report that puts out how misguided, dangerous and counterproductive Labor's policy is, you would expect that they would say, 'Okay, we've got it wrong; we're going to fall back.' But, no, they're knuckling down. They're knuckling down on a policy that will actually harm the housing market, lead to fewer houses and push rents up. If they were ever able to implement this policy, the only questions would be, 'How much damage has been done? How many jobs have been lost? How much have rents gone up?' until they did what they did back in the 1980s. They realised they got it wrong, they realised the harm they were doing, and they reversed that policy. Let's hope they never get that opportunity.

Getting back to the specifics of this bill, it amends the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation Act 2018. The government recently established the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation, a new corporate Commonwealth entity dedicated to improving housing outcomes for Australians. It was established on 30 June this year, upon the commencement of the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation Act 2013. The corporation operates the $1 billion National Housing Infrastructure Facility and an affordable housing bond aggregator. This will provide local governments, registered community housing providers and other eligible applicants with finance for infrastructure that will unlock the supply of new housing. That's what we need to do. We don't need mad policies or counterproductive policies that attack negative gearing for teachers, for firefighters and for the middle class. We need policies that unlock the supply of new housing. That is exactly what this policy is aimed at.

The bill implements the amendments to the act regarding the composition of the board and the time frame for review of the operation of the act. The bill also amends the act to make provisions for the establishment of a special account for the bond aggregator function. The amendments concerning the composition of the board of the corporation and the time frame for review of the operation of the act are minor in their effect and a full commitment that the government gave to the opposition during debate in the Senate on the bill back in June 2018.

The bill will create a special account for the purposes of the $1 billion line of credit, appropriated to the Department of the Treasury, for the function of the commission. Upon the commencement of the bill, the $150 million already appropriated to the Commonwealth for that purpose is to be credited to the special account. The bill also appropriates the remaining $850 million of the $1 billion line of credit, which is to be credited to the special account over four years from the commencement of the bill. The bill will provide a schedule of crediting for the remaining $850 million. This is just a further example of what this House is doing and this government is doing to make sure that we can give as many Australians as possible the opportunity to own their own home.

I'd like to conclude—these comments are my own, not those of the government—by saying that I believe we need to look at giving young people the opportunity to use part of their superannuation savings as a deposit for their own first home. Anyone who goes into retirement without owning their own home will struggle. Instead, you could put aside your superannuation and, when you've hit the age of 65, you could take that superannuation money and then buy a house. Why not allow people to make the investment decision for themselves? They should be able to decide, with their money that they have earned, if they want to invest that in their housing for their retirement. That is good, but it needs to be done while increasing the supply of housing. That is what this bill is aimed at. I commend this bill to the House.

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