Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It seems that, as we get closer to this election, the sloganeering from those opposite becomes shriller and the arguments that they use become less and less connected with the facts. The fact is that Australian home ownership is still very much within the sights and capacity of Australian families. Despite the increase in the cost of housing, other things such as increased take-home pay and the increasingly effective social safety net have retained the capacity of Australians to afford home ownership.

We need to look beyond the sloganeering to see what is actually being done by the Labor Party to people’s confidence in their capacity to purchase their own home. Australians retain an interest in purchasing a home and they retain great confidence in their ability to do so. That is why Australians are prepared to put so much more of their household disposable income each month into their mortgage repayments. They have confidence in the economy of Australia to be able to sustain the jobs that they are in and the spending power that they have to go out there and purchase a home.

The Labor Party purports to be the great saviours of Australians when it comes to home ownership. They have picked up with their polling that people are concerned about the cost of housing and of other things and so they start to parrot the lines that there is some kind of problem and that somehow these things are slipping out of people’s reach. The question needs to be asked: what would the Australian Labor Party do to keep interest rates low? Let us put aside the evidence of what actually happened when Labor was last in office. We know what happened when they were in office. We know how hard it was for Australians to afford homes when interest rates hit 17 per cent. Let us assume that they have repented of that policy somehow—