Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Taking those recommendations from the previous speakers, these price caps are important. They're very carefully calculated, and I think it's reasonable to say that the government is monitoring the operation of these concessions that are offered, particularly by the states, but also median house prices and taking into account unique circumstances in every corner of Australia. As he will be aware, there are capital city caps and caps for the rest of the state. I think the capital city caps are for populations of 250,000 or more. There's no doubt there will be variation between some of these regional centres. Prices can vary significantly. It isn't as simple as running a search, popping in a number and seeing how many are listed below the price. Plenty of properties settle on a price far different from what is listed. Plenty of people are prepared to move away from the centre of a regional centre, for instance, to just outside a regional centre, where a $300,000 cap would cover far more properties than in a specific area of a community that may well be a small regional town or city. So there are options to purchase throughout the region, not just inside a regional city. Lastly, these calculations are not pegged to other things that create uncertainty and confusion, for both the lenders and the borrowers. We're not using median house price indices. They can be volatile. They reflect past sales activity and, as I think the previous member spoke about, are not really a reflection of the current market conditions.

I want to go back in history a little bit, prior to what I think was a really important move into home saver arrangements for single parents. This is an extremely important addition to the original deposit assistance scheme, which has been successful. It has seen extremely low, if not negligible, default rates. That's very encouraging. If we go back to 2018, when this conversation was initiated, the great concern was that any assistance with deposits could lead to higher default rates and overheated housing markets. The first conversations about the deposit assistance scheme emanated from my office in September 2018, at a time when there was no other discussion about this topic. The messages, both to Treasury and to ministries, came from Carolyn Rosario, a former staffer in my office, who identified the need to understand the pressures that people with secure salaries faced in raising a deposit.

In many cases, property growth moved so fast that the deposit requirement also grew so fast that you couldn't even catch up to the deposit with regular savings. This shift we've seen over two decades, where the true hurdle is no longer about earnings but now about finding a deposit, has necessitated a look at deposits. Young electors were telling us they could service these loans without any problems. Their issue is having to raise $50,000 or $80,000. We talk about the bank of mum and dad. But nothing is more unfair than a certain cohort, because of good luck and their parents, being able to purchase a home while others are locked out forever.

The understated element of both the home saver and deposit assistance systems is that we now provide this to people of all backgrounds, and an important extension that we're debating in this legislation takes on the challenge of single parents, predominantly single mums, so they can leave the conditions of unreliable and tenuous rental and find themselves owning their own home. Nothing can be more important, but it is often overlooked by people who live in their own home, than being able to give young children, with otherwise difficult tenancy-landlord arrangements, their own room—able to put a nail in the wall and hang something off it; to walk in the door and kick your shoes off and call it your own place; to invite kids over from school and say this is your place that your parents have just purchased. To know that no landlord is going to boot you out at the end of a lease—the sort of uncertainty that could mean you leave school early because of the rental conditions in the area you live and, potentially, the job that your parents have. That is all, effectively, addressed with deposit assistance.

In a rapidly moving property market, as we see right now, post COVID, and as we see confidence coming back to real estate, again we see people desperate to get on what we call the property conveyer belt. As they tell us in this chamber, repeatedly—they tell us from every corner of Australia—once you're on the escalator, you're on it for life. Property ownership sets up a decision tree with a completely different pathway of choices. In prospect theory, we know that choice is about risk and benefit, and whether we have risk aversion towards loss or are prepared to take a gamble. With buying a home, the gamble you want to take is to be paying off your own home and mortgage—

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