John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Urquhart talks about affordable housing. How soon we forget! I have not forgotten the days of the so-called world's greatest Treasurer, the days of Mr Keating, when I was paying a 25.25 per cent interest rate. Many Australians had 17 per cent home loans. Lucky they were regulated—they could have been 25 per cent as well. We talk about investment, and we discussed it recently especially in relation to buying farms. On 1 January 2013, the Labor Party brought in a regulation about investment. If you earned more than $250,000 a year, gross—your wage, in our case our travel allowance, and superannuation—and you bought a business it was not tax-deductible but if you bought a house it was. If any one of the 226 politicians in this building went and bought a house, they could get a tax deduction for. But if anybody wanted to buy a farm, no, they did not want that—let the foreigners buy them. I discovered this the hard way—