Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask leave of the House to make a ministerial statement relating to five per cent deposits for all first home buyers.

Leave granted.

I begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to Ngunnawal elders past, present and emerging. And, as always in this housing conversation of ours, I acknowledge that, for all the challenges that we face as a country, our First Nations brothers and sisters face particular issues with housing, and that's something that our government is fiercely committed to tackling.

Australia is in the middle of a housing crisis that's been 40 years in the making. For 40 years, our country has not been building enough homes and we've not been backing in first home buyers right across the nation.

And so today, housing is a life-defining challenge for millions of people who live in our country. We hear it from young people, who feel they will never have the chance to own their own home. We hear it from parents, who feel such guilt that they are not going to be able to give their children the stability that they received in their childhood. We hear it from renters, whose rents are going up too high and too often. And, Deputy Speaker Young, we see it in that rising population of homeless Australians who I see in my suburb and you would see in yours.

But housing is about even more than the individuals who are affected by this problem. Housing is the foundation on which every Australian experiences life in our country. It defines the expectations that young people have about their future, and it lays bare the injustice between generations. Housing is about how invested our citizens feel in their democracy, and whether they feel stability, and confidence, as they move through their lives. Housing is about what it means to be Australian and who gets to live a good life in our country. And it's about what we, in this chamber, are willing to do to make sure that they get it.

Now, like any great national challenge, changing it is going to fall on our party. Housing is the Labor project of our generation.

For a long time, the Commonwealth government had tapped out of our national housing challenge, leaving the hard work of this problem up to the states. And indeed, for most of the nine years that the coalition were in power in our country, they didn't even have a housing minister. Deputy Speaker, you're not going to believe this, but, during those nine years, those opposite built 373 social and affordable homes. That is a national disgrace.

Now, under this Prime Minister and under our Labor government, we've made a big switch. We're tackling the housing crisis from every angle. Our government is the boldest and most ambitious Australian government on housing since the post-war period. We've got a $43 billion agenda, and it's focused on three things: (1) building more homes; (2) making renters get a better deal; and (3) getting more Australians into homeownership.

Since we were elected, our policies have made a real difference to many people around our country:

Now, we know that the long-term solution to our nation's housing problems is to build, build, build. And that's exactly why the majority of that $43 billion that we are spending on housing is targeted at improving supply, whether it's delivering our 55,000 social and affordable homes, whether it's building those 100,000 homes that we will reserve just for first home buyers or whether it's training more tradies.

But we know that Australians need help to get into the housing market now, and so many young people around our country in particular feel that this is slipping out of reach. Right now, young people are saving for years. They are often stuck in a rent trap, paying off someone else's mortgage. Then, when they are ready to buy a house after those long years of savings, they get whacked with huge upfront costs like lenders mortgage insurance.

Let me paint a picture of what this looks like for a young person living in Brisbane. We might have a young person, a 25-year-old, who has just finished their studies and renting as they begin their life working. This young person might share a dream that's common to millions of people around our country and that is to get into a home of her own. The problem is that, unlike some of her uni mates, this young person doesn't have the bank of mum and dad to give her a leg up on the housing ladder. In Brisbane today, the average house price is about a million dollars, which means that, to buy an average house with a 20 per cent deposit, she would have to save up $200,000. For the average first home buyer it would take more than 13 years to save up that much money. We're talking about a young person who is going to be saving and renting until she's 38 years old. If she decides to buy without a 20 per cent deposit, she's going to get whacked with mortgage insurance—paying up to $43,000 just for mortgage insurance for that first home. If she does haven't that money, and she can't get her parents to chip in, then she's probably one of the many young people around our country who feel that homeownership is a million miles out of reach.

It gets even tougher for young families who are dealing with kids. Families who have got kids—they've worked hard and they've saved for years. They might have put away $180,000 for a home deposit. That's enough for a 20 per cent deposit on a $900, 000 home. They might dream to buy a house big enough for a growing family, close to work and near their communities, so they go house hunting and to auction after auction. We hear it from our constituents—the heartbreak of going weekend after weekend to auctions, just to see houses blow way past their budget as investors outbid them by hundreds of thousands of dollars. We know that in Sydney today the average house price is $1.5 million. With $180,000 these young people still can't compete. So what can they do without support? Their options just don't look good.

These are the Australians that our Labor government was elected to this parliament to serve. That is why we made such an important announcement this week, which is going to help the people who I've referred to. This week the Prime Minister and I announced that our government is bringing the dream of homeownership back within reach for tens of thousands of Australians every single year. From 1 October this year, the days of 20 per cent deposits for first home buyers will be over. The Albanese government is delivering on its commitment to give all first home buyers the opportunity to buy a home with just a five per cent deposit, and it's not just that. We're doing it three months ahead of schedule. We're doing it three months ahead of schedule because we can provide that help more quickly and, if we can, we should. Our government is unequivocally and unashamedly on the side of people looking to get into their first home, and we're backing them all the way with our five per cent deposit scheme.

There are going to be three changes that come in for this scheme on 1 October. The first is that, for the first time, there will be no caps on this scheme. That means that there is no limit to the number of first home buyers who can now buy a home with Commonwealth government support. It means that for our regional Australians and for our single parents, who previously had limited places under this scheme, they now have unlimited access to this program. Second, we are removing income caps. That means that hardworking first home buyers and families who were previously locked out of this scheme, for the first time, will be eligible to get support. Third, we're increasing property price caps so they're in line with average house prices. It means that this is not just about small apartments, units or homes in hard-to-reach locations but about the average home in our capital cities and our regions.

These changes are important. They aim to change what homeownership looks like for an entire generation of young Australians. The median house price in Australia today is $844,000. Five per cent of that is about $42,000. The last time that $42,000 covered a 20 per cent deposit for a median home was in 2002—more than 20 years ago. This shows you the scale of the change we are making here. We are not only helping first home buyers get into a home earlier; we're helping them save billions of dollars. In the first year alone, first home buyers using this scheme are expected to avoid $1.5 billion in potential mortgage insurance costs. This is a game changer.

Our government's five per cent deposit program is already changing lives for hundreds of thousands of first home buyers around the country. And the proof's in the pudding. We're really proud, because in our first term there were 6,000 more first-home-buyer loans each year compared to the coalition's previous period in office. We've already lifted support and we're already seeing those first-homeowner numbers lift.

Since coming to office, our government has helped over 180,000 first home buyers buy with a lower deposit. On Monday, the Prime Minister, the member for Canberra and I were lucky to visit two of these buyers, who are right here in Canberra—Lachie and Abbey. With the government's support, Lachie, Abbey and Chilli the dog have been able to buy a townhouse in Lawson with just a five per cent deposit.

Meeting Lachie and Abbey was just amazing, because we sat down with this fantastic young couple and we heard straight from them how they would never have been able to buy their home without the support of our government. And they talked about the simple pleasures that they are getting to enjoy as homeowners, that feeling of knowing that they can't be moved on, of having their friends around for movie nights, of thinking about starting a family down the track. It's worked so well for them that a friend has now used the scheme to buy a house across the road, and other friends are looking to use the program as well. Well, the expansion of the five per cent deposit scheme will mean that even more Australians can get a place of their own—just like Lachie and Abbey—from 1 October.

It's thanks to every single member on this side of the House that our government can make this a reality. Take the members for Solomon and Braddon, who represent first home buyers at the northern and southern ends of our country. In both Devonport and Darwin, a first home buyer can now buy a $500,000 home with a deposit of $25,000. They'll save up to $15,000 in mortgage insurance and up to $80,000 that they would have paid in potential rents while they were saving for their first home.

Take the member for Bendigo, who has been an absolutely outstanding advocate for the young people in her community who want better housing opportunities. Our government has already helped 1,100 first home buyers to buy a home in Bendigo with a lower deposit. A first home buyer in Bendigo can now buy an average $620,000 home with a deposit of $31,000. This takes six years off the time it takes for them to save a deposit, and they'll save $26,000 in mortgage insurance. I talk to young people who have used this program. Six years—it changes their life. This reshapes the experience of their 20s and 30s and gives them the opportunity to set down the roots and get them those better opportunities we want them to see.

Deputy Speaker Young, you might think that the opposition would get behind a policy like this, because it helps give young Australians a fighting chance in the housing market. But they didn't. In fact, you're not going to believe this: the shadow housing minister called this announcement 'bizarre and ridiculous'. There is nothing 'bizarre and ridiculous' about helping first home buyers around this country get into their own home.

Now the coalition has a really clear choice here. They can be a part of the solution this term or they can keep doing nothing. We've got a new Leader of the Liberal Party in Canberra. We've got a new opportunity for those opposite to work with the government on housing. And I've said time and time again, in the last parliament, and I'll continue to say it in this one: our door is open to work with the coalition on housing, as it is to all our parliamentary colleagues.

While those opposite might continue to block and delay progress on housing, we're getting on with the job. This term we're going to:

And, of course, we know the main issue here is we've got to build, build, build, and that's exactly the work our government's doing.

Our government's getting on with the job. We're building more homes. We're making it better to rent. And, yes, we're making it easier to buy.

I present the Housing Australia Investment Mandate Amendment (Delivering on Our 2025 Election Commitment) Direction 2025 and a copy of my ministerial statement.

Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Link to 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.

…   …   …

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.

Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House take note of the Housing Australia Investment Mandate Amendment (Delivering on Our 2025 Election Commitment) Direction 2025.

Debate adjourned.