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

I rise to speak on the member for Maribyrnong's motion on housing this morning. I just heard the member mention renters. Are these better protections for renters in the room with us? It's like this government is allergic to doing anything to help renters, consistently refusing calls to coordinate with the states to stop unlimited rent increases or provide some semblance of security through mechanisms like long-term leases and stopping no-cause evictions. Renting is as insecure as ever. Rents in Brisbane have risen 50 per cent over the last five years while wages have only increased 19 per cent, and renters get punished by rate rises too.

'The unemployment rate will probably have to rise,' says Michele Bullock, the head of the RBA, who herself settled on a $2 million luxury holiday home on the coast on the same day that she hiked interest rates. That's hundreds of thousands more people unemployed. If Bullock gets her way and keeps on hiking interest rates, that's millions more people struggling to pay their mortgage and forgoing a holiday, a present for their kids or a health check-up. For people like Michele Bullock, who has a $1.2 million salary a year, that's just numbers. It's just what the economy needs.

But you're not a number. People are not numbers, and the economy doesn't need it. Corporate greed demands it. You didn't cause this latest round of inflation. Trump's war with Albanese's support and corporate profiteering did. Yet we're told we have to pay for it. But the people making the decision to hike interest rates, to support these wars and to let corporations price gouge us are completely exempt from the consequences. Politicians aren't the ones who'll be choosing between buying groceries and paying their mortgage. They make the decisions and are immune to their effects. They don't care about everyday people anymore. They only seem to care about the ultrawealthy and massive corporations.

The RBA has only one lever it can use—interest rates. When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but the government can do a lot more to tackle inflation and tackle rising inequality. The value of housing has gone up astronomically over the past couple of decades, a hugely strong contributor to inflation. A big reason for that is our tax settings, particularly negative gearing and the 50 per cent CGT, capital gains tax, discount. The Greens-led Senate inquiry into the operation of the CGT discount recently released their report that confirmed the extent to which it contributes to inequality in this country. It also heard from a wealth of economists, who agreed that winding back the CGT discount is absolutely vital for tackling inequality and reining in house price growth.

A teacher earning $100,000 a year should not pay more tax than someone earning $100,000 from their investment properties. A retail worker earning $70,000 a year shouldn't pay more tax than someone earning $70,000 from shares. We shouldn't tax workers more than asset owners, but that's what the capital gains tax discount enables, quite literally dividing our society between the haves and the have-nots. When the Howard government brought in the capital gains tax discount, a house cost six times the average wage. Now it costs 11 times the average wage. In just 25 years, the cost of buying a house relative to your income has almost doubled.

So, at auctions around the country, first home buyers are being constantly outbid by property investors that have more cash to play around with due to the CGT discount. Eighty-three per cent of the benefit of the CGT discount goes to the top 10 per cent of income earners—83 per cent!—and around 60 per cent to the top one per cent alone. Let's be clear: that is literal transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the ultrawealthy. The CGT discount was supposedly introduced to help productivity, but it's having the opposite effect, acting as just a huge government subsidy for the wealthy. It overwhelmingly goes to capital gains on existing housing stock, and business investment has proportionately gone down since it was introduced. The CGT discount is an overwhelming failure that needs to be wound back urgently.

See this speech in context