Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The government is finally taking action on housing. If you're a property investor, hurrah! This policy is for you. You can celebrate this. House prices are going to increase even further. You heard me right. Labor's First Home Guarantee, which allows first home buyers to buy property with a five per cent deposit, is another purported solution that's just going to make the housing crisis worse.

In Brisbane, including in my electorate of Ryan, house prices have doubled in the last 10 years. Nationally, home values and home prices have already increased by three per cent since the start of 2025, and respected analysts are saying that this policy could lead to a more than 15 per cent increase in house prices over the next six years. Experts have advised—they've actually told the government—that this policy will just drive up prices further. The Australian public have told the government that they want real action on housing that actually helps them, and who's the government actually listening to? Big property—the property industry and property investors, who will receive this largesse to the tune of $175 billion in tax handouts over the next 10 years through negative gearing and capital gains discounts.

What do mortgage holders and renters actually get? Zero. A big fat zero—absolutely nothing. Labor effectively continues gifting money to big investors with dozens or hundreds of properties in their portfolios, turbocharging house prices and pretty much screwing over everyone else in the process.

The Commonwealth Bank just posted a $10 billion yearly profit off the back of soaring house prices. The Commonwealth Bank used to be ours. It used to be publicly owned, by us, until it was sold off by Labor in the nineties. It's now a massive, private corporation focused on profit for its shareholders. That's what it is. It's certainly not focused on the greater good, is it? It's certainly not part of a solution for access to housing for everyday Australians.

The other big banks aren't far off CommBank's big profit figure. They're going to be absolutely ecstatic at this government's latest fix for the housing crisis allowing a five per cent deposit with no mortgage insurance. Why? It's because it allows them—this is why they'll be happy—to extract even bigger interest payments out of even more first home buyers while still turbocharging house prices further, and further, and further up, putting housing out of reach for so many millions of Australians. The risk for the banks is minimal, because they know if they issue too many dodgy loans and things go south, the government has their back and will bail them out with taxpayer money—your money.

It's a great scheme, if you're the Labor Party trying to look like you're doing something about the housing crisis while keeping your donors—the banks and the property industry—happy. The best way to actually fix the housing crisis—if that's what we're actually here for and if that's what we're trying to do—would be to scrap negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount and invest those enormous sums of money in actually building public housing.

Well, the government has finally decided to build some public housing—no, not for ordinary Australians, silly. It's building housing for US military personnel. That's right! The first piece of housing legislation for this term of parliament isn't for the government to build public housing that ordinary Australians can live in, and it isn't for winding back unfair tax concessions so that first home buyers don't get outcompeted by property investors. It's to allow the government to spend an unspecified amount of money—totally obfuscated—building housing for the US military on Australian soil as part of the AUKUS agreement. I really wish I was making this up, but—I'm sorry—it's true. For years, the Greens have been trying to get the government to actually build public housing, like governments used to—like governments actually should. But we're told that that's unrealistic; it's not a serious demand. It turns out you can live in public housing built by the federal government—you just need to sign up to the US military to do that.

If you're a teacher or a nurse working hard but you can't afford a house or find a rental, this government is simply not servicing your needs in terms of your access to housing. Doesn't it care about you? It's made its priority clear—serving the US military-industrial complex over the needs of ordinary Australians, who are so desperate for access to housing.

The recent productivity roundtable agreed that productivity reform in the housing industry is urgently needed. It's absolutely essential for Australians; it's essential for the economy. Trophy homes and megamansions are what we're actually building in Australia instead of public housing. The capital gains discount encourages homeowners to build ever-larger, ever more expensive houses and apartments. A significant portion, a huge amount, of the Australian building industry is tied up with these elaborate, top-of-the-market construction projects: trophy homes, luxury apartments and monster renos. They tie up a huge proportion of our most creative builders, skilled tradespeople and expensive materials in Australia.

As an architect, I've actually witnessed firsthand the devastating reduction of productivity in the housing sector since 1995. This decline matches exactly the period in which Australia's homes have increased in size to exploit the tax-free capital gains discounts. From 1994 to 2024, newly built detached houses increased in size by 30 per cent, while household size decreased by seven per cent. Abolishing capital gains discounts makes it much less attractive for wealthy investors to put their money in inert property, where it just drives up property prices, making it harder and harder for first home buyers entering the market. Incentivising good builders to move from large, complex and slow home building to compact, simple and affordable construction would dramatically improve the number of new homes being built. The abolition of capital gains tax discounts would have a real, a tangible, effect on the cost of housing.

There are real solutions to the housing crisis—solutions that could be implemented today. But what the government is proposing is no solution. I would argue that it's the opposite of that. What the government is doing is actively exacerbating the problem.

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