Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Homeownership goes to the core of what this nation is all about. It goes not just to bricks and mortar, which is central to economic security and the ambition that Australians have for what they want for themselves to be able to support their families throughout the stages of their working life and their retirement. It goes to the romantic ideals of who we are as a people and the idea about what we want to be as a country. It goes, centrally, to whether we want to be a nation with democratic ownership of our country, of the land that sits beneath our feet and the assets that we seek to build upon it. That is why the coalition is the party of homeownership.

We want to be a nation of owners. We do not want a nation of renters. We want to see young Australians cock their heads higher and look further to the distance, because we want young Australians not just to look at the challenges they face today but to look to the ambitions of what they can live tomorrow. But that isn't what we see from this government. Amongst the spin, the policy and the claims that they have put forward today—and that they continue to seek to put through in their claimed legislation—in practice, what they are doing is seeking to borrow from tomorrow to prop up their government today. They're gaslighting younger Australians as part of the process, every single day.

What they're actually doing so often, tragically, is setting young Australians up for failure. We see this in the government's decision to actively encourage young Australians to take on more debt when they're not in a position, necessarily, to finance it. Independent economists are now warning that the consequences of uncapping the scheme are an increase in the cost of insurance and a rise in house prices for the next generation of Australians—all so the Labor Party can come into this House and boast about their success.

Labor's distortion of the Home Guarantee Scheme will not achieve the objectives that they claim it will. What it will do is dump a $60 billion liability onto taxpayers and push house prices up by as much as 10 per cent. The next time a young Australian goes to bid for a house, and they see a price, they'll already think, 'Well, if the market pushes a little bit further, they'll have to add a GST equivalent on top of it just for the cost of Labor's legacy of their political spin.'

The government are stealing the futures of young Australians, as some of my colleagues behind me are correctly observing, because they don't have a plan or vision for the future or a solution about how to get house prices to go down. This was a highly targeted scheme, originally. It was for low-income earners, to put them in a position, where they may not otherwise have been, to achieve their best ambition and their best dreams. By turbocharging it, as they have done, they are turbocharging the consequences of increasing house prices for every Australian, for no benefit. What they see is a political gain, not a gain for the Australian people. Former RBA economist, Martin Eftimoski, has warned the expansion will jack up prices. He also said:

The timing of the announcement and the movement of the announcement in particular I think will have a very stimulatory effect on the market.

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Launching this policy now is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

How proud the Labor party must be, because the Labor Party always finds a way to take more of working Australians' income to shove into a superannuation fund so that people can have a larger 67th birthday cake, but their only answer these days is to shovel more government control into people's homes. This is the problem with the priorities of the Labor party. It's always about control. The Labor Party are about controlling your life. They are not about agency, empowerment or determination for you. Homeownership is about more than bricks and mortar. It's about the type of country that we want to be, and this debate has gone on for decades.

It might sound like it was all in the past, but this debate has been raging since after the Second World War. We needed to build houses so returned soldiers had somewhere to live. Then, Labor wanted homes to be rented off the government. Today, they want you to rent off a super fund. Then, Liberals wanted homes to be owned by you. Today, Liberals still want homes to be owned by you. Nothing has changed. The debate remains the same.

Labor wants to control you. When you rent, you have a law—and that is what they want. When you are on welfare, you are dependent—and that is what they want. When you are an employee, you have a boss—and that is what they want. When you invest with industry super, they control your savings and retirement—and that is what they want. Labor wants to control you, because when they control you they can work between big business, big government and big unions to dictate the terms—and empower themselves.

Liberals want to empower you. When you own your own home, you have agency and security. When you work, you have choices in your life. When you run a small business, you are your own boss. When you run a self-managed super fund, you control your retirement. Liberals want you to control your own destiny, and that is the fundamental divide that exists between both sides of this chamber. They are in power to control you. We are in office to empower you.

Of course, there is hope. There is a reason for a brighter future. You can get a good education without crippling debt and without the government having to, then, come and forgive it because they created it. You can have a family. You can work hard and save. You can own a home. Do not believe Labor when they talk down your ambition. You are not destined to rent, as Labor would wish. You may not always start where you want to end, but homeownership is a dream that is lived by Australians every day. The promise of this nation lives and you are going to be part of it, and the Liberal Party is going to be there to cheer you on, to back you in, every step of the way.

That is core to the difference between us and the Labor Party, our policies and the Labor Party's. It is the difference between our ambition for what we want to see, because the policies the Labor Party is putting forward now are to try to address the problems that they have created. They have no empathy, understanding or concern for the present challenges or for the challenges of future generations. They are spending more taxpayer money today than they have ever spent before, and they are building fewer homes than ever before. The $10 billion fund they legislated in the last parliament has currently built 17 new houses. They've wasted $43 billion of taxpayer money to make Australia's housing crisis even worse. In just three years, the government has presided over the biggest boom in Australia's population growth since the 1950s, while watching, witnessing and observing a historic housing construction collapse. This is not a proud record for any government, let alone this government; whereas we got on with the job of building new homes.

In the last period of the coalition government, we built close to 200,000 new homes a year. Under Labor it has dropped to barely 170,000 a year. Labor promised to build 1.2 million homes by 2029 in their National Housing Accord. Not only are they not going to get there but also they are now borrowing from the future—and mortgaging your future—so they have half a pathway to get there. We all know that.

There is a point where mature adults need to stand up and point out that this government has no answers to the challenges and the problems that our nation faces. One of the reasons they've made housing such a central tenet of this week in parliament is that they have been shamed and embarrassed after their tax hike summit from last week—where their only concrete substantive outcome was to finally adopt a coalition policy, from the last election, that they ridiculed.

Before the last election, the coalition put forward a simple proposition: to pause the National Construction Code so that builders could get on with building more housing, to address the national housing crisis that Australia faces right now. At the time, the housing minister ridiculed the proposition. She dismissed it and said it had no solution to being part of addressing our housing crisis in this country. She had no answers herself, except to borrow more from the future and mortgage Australians' futures to try and solve a problem to get her through an election. Well, they got through that election. There is no dispute about that.

They then went to their tax hike summit only last week, and there was only one concrete policy that came out of it. It was to pause the National Construction Code, the coalition's policy that they ridiculed only months ago, because industry pointed out to them—and they were forced to listen in a humiliating backdown—that they were the source of the problems that Australia's construction industry face right now. So, yes, the government is doing a massive amount of work to bandaid the problems they have caused. The government is making as much spin as they can to hide from the fact that they caused this crisis, they're part of this crisis, they're living this crisis and Australians are living the consequences of this crisis. It's time they owned up. It's time they lived with the consequences of it. It's time they fixed the consequences of it, and it isn't by mortgaging the future so that they can solve their political crisis. It's by empowering Australians to build out the next best wave of opportunity and excitement for future generations. That is what the coalition is here to do.

The Liberal Party has always believed in the power and importance of homeownership. It goes to the core of the ethos of who we are because we know that, when people get a good education, they save. They get ahead. They work hard. They form a family. They buy their own home. They become masters of their own destiny. They create an opportunity for themselves and their families to get ahead. They then are in a position to go off, start a small business, truly become independent economic actors and go from little platoons to little capitalists and full economic participants in the Australian way of life. They are then able to invest in their future and be a part of the full economic success of our country. That is what we want—a nation that is not governed from Canberra down by big unions, big corporates, big capital, big superfunds and big government. We want a nation governed up from citizens, families, communities and homes. That is the Liberal vision for this country, and it is one that we are proud to stand by.

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