Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the First Home Saver Accounts (Further Provisions) Amendment Bill 2008 and related legislation. I note that this bill is essentially an administrative bill to impose a levy in order to finalise the government’s First Home Saver Accounts scheme and that it imposes this levy to provide funding for APRA to carry out supervision of financial institutions which offer this scheme. So in that sense I welcome it.

I want to make some brief remarks in relation to the importance of housing affordability. Clearly there has been a decline in housing affordability. We have seen in recent years a spike in house prices in a number of markets, including, in South Australia, the Adelaide market, where housing affordibility is becoming increasingly difficult for young people who are not in the housing market and who do not have the benefit of being able to sell their existing home with significant capital gains in order to buy another home. It is become increasingly difficult.

I think one of the bedrocks of a good society is to ensure that we have high levels of homeownership, but for too many young Australians in particular and those who, through changed life circumstances, find themselves in the real estate market again this dream has become a nightmare. I think we need to pause to reflect briefly on the implications of a drop in the homeownership rate, on what that means for us as a society in terms of people giving up on buying homes, not getting into the market and deciding to spend their income on other items rather than what I consider to be a bedrock in society: having that home and having that foundation in a community.

I agree with Senator Humphries that there are many other things that can be done. I see this move by the government as a good first step. But I think it is important that we consider not just land release but also planning laws. I am not a great subscriber to the view that you simply have increased urban sprawl in terms of the carbon footprint and in terms of the impact that has on the environment.

In Adelaide, Madam Acting Deputy President, as you may well be aware, before World War II about 46,000 people lived in the City of Adelaide in what was known as the ‘square mile’. Now there are something like 22,000 people living there, fewer than half as many as 70 years ago and significantly fewer than, for instance, at the turn of the century. There is no reason why Adelaide has not got the capacity to have many more people living in the CBD. The Adelaide City Council suggests going back to pre-World War II levels. I think we should be bolder and go for a much more ambitious figure of up to, say, 100,000 people living in the CBD. That would involve the Commonwealth playing an active role—to put it bluntly, putting a rocket up state governments, who are dragging their feet on planning laws and, I think, standing in the way of allowing for environmentally sustainable, sensible developments that will allow for affordable housing, particularly in the CBDs of our cities and in transit corridors. There have been suggestions that that is the way governments are going across the country, and I welcome that, but I think much more needs to be done much more quickly in order to deal with that problem.

So, whilst this legislation is welcome in order to anchor the package announced by the government with respect to this saving scheme, unless you tackle those fundamental issues of housing affordability, of planning laws, of the release of land and of affordable housing generally—for which state governments bear a great deal of responsibility in terms of rates, taxes and impositions on new developments—I think that we will simply be moving too slowly in increasing the levels of homeownership in this country and ensuring that young people actually have a fighting chance of getting into the housing market. With those brief remarks, I indicate that I support this legislation, and I hope it is a package of many measures that in the future will make a dramatic difference in our level of homeownership in this country.