Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Cormann, I put to you that the amount of money, the $135 million, that you are saving over five years in abolishing the last housing affordability mechanism in the policy toolbox that you had not yet obliterated—it is almost as though you had swept aside and wiped out everything to do with housing affordability and homelessness and this one particular instrument escaped your attention and so you are coming back to squash it—is what we concede to property investors through negative gearing and capital gains tax discount arrangements every six days. Minister, have you considered that you might actually be looking in completely the wrong place for savings? Will you take another look at what these two huge tax concessions to property investors are costing regular taxpayers?