Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to questions without notice asked by Senators Carr and Webber today relating to interest rates and first home owners.

Senator Minchin today was asked a series of questions relating to direct impacts on the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of Australian families. These are people who are now most at risk of losing their homes because of interest rate rises. In fact there have been seven interest rate rises in a row, and three of these have occurred since John Howard promised to keep interest rates at record lows. Following the Prime Minister’s lead, today we saw Senator Minchin attempting to pass the buck on the issue—trying to blame everybody else but the government itself. Unfortunately for him, he is also on the record—and Senator Minchin is still with us here, perhaps he could advise us as to why this is the case—in February this year as saying that interest rates are the most important factor in relation to housing. Now, of course, we have a situation where the government is seeking to blame the states and blame anyone else for the increasing deterioration in housing affordability.

One minute we are told that interest rates are the most important factor and then when they go up, causing pain for many hundreds of thousands of hardworking families, suddenly someone else is held responsible. Senator Minchin’s somewhat condescending response has demonstrated that this government has simply run out of ideas when it comes to the question of housing repayments and meeting the cost of keeping a roof over your head. They simply do not care about the fate of hundreds of thousands of Australian families in the face of skyrocketing default rates. All they offer is condescending financial advice. Senator Minchin, in a somewhat desperate manner, resorted to arguing that the first home owners grant scheme was introduced to help first home owners into ownership. Of course this response directly conflicts with what Senator Minchin has said in the past. I have referred already to the fact that, back in February, he said that the first home owners grant was:

... introduced at the time of the new tax system’s introduction was very much and overtly in recognition of the consequences for home purchasers of the introduction of the goods and services tax.

We heard Senator Minchin go on to say that the grant:

... was and is a grant which acknowledges the one-off impact of the goods and services tax on the purchase of a home.

Then we were told that this was a grant to compensate for the GST; now we are told it is a device by which the government seeks to address the question of housing affordability.

We know that the pain being felt by Australian families is real and is not just a fantasy which the government seeks to dismiss in its rather cavalier manner. The Supreme Court of Victoria’s figures on mortgage repossessions show there has been a massive 58 per cent increase in the number of writs issued between 2004-05 and 2005-06. There was an increase in mortgage repossession writs from 1,948 to 3,084. In South Australia the Supreme Court figures indicate that the number of repossession summonses lodged increased by more than a third over the same period: from 371 to 476. In New South Wales, Supreme Court mortgage repossession statistics show an incredible 59 per cent increase in judgments between 2004-05, which is the fastest increase in 16 years—a jump from 3,061 in 2004 to 4,873 in 2005.

What we are seeing, of course, is the dark side of the housing boom—a boom described by the Prime Minister on 17 March 2004 as being ‘fantastic for the economy’. At that time, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer were happy to take the credit for higher house prices when they thought they were good news. Of course, now that we see clearly that the housing boom is far from being fantastic for the economy, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have been trying to shift the blame for this pain to state governments.

In yesterday’s motion in the House of Representatives, they went one step further and tried to shift the blame to local governments. One minute they are shifting costs; the next moment they are shifting blame. It goes to show how hollow the resolution on local government that they passed just last week was. Labor does agree with Peter Costello on something; at least, we agree with something he said in 2003, where he— (Time expired)