Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Hansard source

Before coming into this place, I made my living out of being a builder and a construction lawyer, so essentially I was involved in the building industry for 35-odd years before I came in here. I like to think I know a little bit about the building industry and how it operates. This bill, this budget, is going to be an absolute disaster for the Australian economy. It's going to be an absolute disaster for mums and dads. Over the weekend, I went home, and I had the Maleny Agricultural Show on Friday and Saturday. It was a beautiful couple of days, and I had so many people coming up to me and talking to me about how this budget was going to impact upon them personally. There was not one person spoke to me favourably about this budget, and there's a good reason for that. When we look at some of the changes that this bill seeks to introduce—I'll touch on the first one: negative gearing.

We've read this book before, and we know how it ends. In the 1980s, Paul Keating got rid of negative gearing. What happened to rental prices in Melbourne and Sydney? They absolutely skyrocketed. That so-called reform did not last two years before he had to capitulate on that. No-one, not one person on the other side—not even the Cabinet Secretary, with all of his brilliance as an economist—has been able to demonstrate to anyone in this country why what we will get today will be any different to what happened in the 1980s. They say that to keep doing what you've always been doing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. I think Einstein said that. But the reality is that we know how this is going to end. It's going to end in tears.

And, if rents go up, what is the one challenge that so many young people talk to us about when it comes to them buying a house? It's saving a deposit. It's a lot harder to save for your deposit if you're shelling out more money in rent. I've seen some suggestions from different economists that say that these changes will increase rents in Sydney by $160 a week and in Melbourne by $130 a week. They're talking about potentially up to 20 per cent increases in residential rents. When young people are finding it increasingly difficult to save for a deposit, I don't know how these changes are going to make it any easier for them to get into a house. This government has consistently said since the budget that this is all about 'intergenerational fairness'. Well, this has nothing to do with intergenerational fairness. This is a cash grab. The reality is that this government has run out of their money and now they are coming after everyday Australians for more of their money. This is the biggest attempt to redistribute wealth in this country that certainly I have seen in my very short lifetime.

Australians are angry, and they should be angry, because they weren't expecting this. They were told repeatedly by this prime minister and his frontbench that there were going to be no changes to housing tax, no changes to superannuation and no changes to trusts. They breached that when they tried to bring in their tax on unrealised capital gains on superannuation funds, and eventually the Treasurer backed down, because I think he was the only person in the world who thought it was a good idea. But then they continued. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer continued. Even before the 2022 election, they went to the election saying there'll be no changes—no changes to CGT, no changes to negative gearing, no changes to trusts and no changes to superannuation. They said that again in the lead-up to the 2025 election, repeatedly. The Prime Minister castigated a journalist in a presser at one stage saying: 'How many times have I got to say this—50 times? There'll be no changes.' And yet here we are, less than 12 months after the 2025 election, when they've won a thumping majority—an absolute thumping majority—by giving those representations.

The member for Fadden is a colleague of mine as a lawyer. We would call those misrepresentations—actionable misrepresentations. It's a fair enough position for the everyday Australian to rely upon a representation made by the government of the day that they will not change something. When the Prime Minister stands up, particularly when he says things like, 'My word is my bond. I'm not going to make these changes'—

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