Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Do you ever get the feeling around this place that it does not matter what question is before this chamber or what issue we are discussing, the answer that comes back from the Greens, every time, is 'More taxes; higher taxes'? That is their answer to pretty much every problem facing the globe today. It does not matter whether it is climate change, royalties in the mining sector or housing affordability, their policy is: more taxes.

Most people expect that the Greens will support higher taxes, bigger government and more control. That is their right, and that is fine. What people do not always expect is that the Labor Party will share their views on this. On this issue, the Labor Party is joining with the Greens to try to hike up taxes on housing in this country, particularly taxes on those who invest in housing. There are around 1.3 million people in Australia who use some form of negative gearing for housing, and all of those people will face a tax increase if a Labor-Greens government gets back in, in the next term. There is no doubt that whatever the Greens say now will become Labor policy later. If the Labor Party were to get back into government they would need the Greens' preferences and they would have to do their bidding. The Greens want to put up taxes on housing. This removal of negative gearing is a tax increase, plain and simple. It is something that should be opposed by anybody who wants to see more investment in housing. You do not encourage more investment in an asset by taxing it more. If you tax it more you will get less investment in that particular part of our economy, and that will make our affordability issues even starker and worse.

A little earlier, Senator Ludlam said that we are going to grandfather it. You cannot grandfather this stuff, because it is capital markets and an asset price. When you are pricing assets you look at what the returns will be over time, not just today—certainly not in the past, because that is not matter—and you look at what the returns will be in the future. That is how you determine an asset price.

The price you pay for a house or shares or any assets will be what you expect the income to be for those assets over time. Under the Greens and the Labor Party, potentially, if you buy a housing asset you will receive lower returns, because you will not have access to the same taxation treatment that other assets do. That will mean—surprise, surprise—the price you receive for that asset will be lower. For those 1.3 million Australians who have invested in housing under existing tax laws, who have taken risks under the current treatment that has been around for decades, they face that negative impact, thanks to the uncertainty that has been created by the Labor and Greens parties. That is not a solution to encourage more investment in housing. If you create uncertainty about the returns that might flow to investment in housing, we will not get more housing.

If we want to bring housing prices down and be serious about trying to help Australians afford their own homes, we need more supplies of land and more supplies of housing. We could do one other thing—there are two blades to the scissors, as always. One blade is supply and the other blade is demand. We could try to hurt demand. We could try to reduce demand for housing. But the only way we could do that, to have a serious impact on housing, would be to have some kind of economic slowdown or—God forbid—a recession. I certainly do not want to see that happen in this country.

While ever we have strong economic or even moderate economic growth in Australia, there will always be slightly increasing demand for housing and that will have a slight upward pressure on housing. May that continue, because I want to see an Australia that has a strong economy. The Labor Party seems to want lower house prices, at the moment, and lower house prices are a recipe for a weaker economy.

We can try to moderate the house-price growth by moderately increasing supply for housing. Here in this chamber and at the federal level of government, we do not control the release of land for housing. It is a state government issue. State governments have, at times, been slow to develop land, particularly at the fringes of cities and in urban consolidation. But it is not our area of expertise and we should try to 'stick to our knitting' in Australian government. We always seem to have this preference to stick our fingers into other people's problems. We have enough problems to deal with here, in the federal parliament, without trying to solve the problems of state parliaments.

The former Rudd Labor government tried to do this. They tried to set up a Major Cities Unit. The tried to put through a COAG housing-supply reform. The tried to establish a National Rental Affordability Scheme. All of those proposals came to nought. Indeed, the National Rental Affordability Scheme was massively scammed and had to be shut down.