Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The ignorance of the Turnbull government when it comes to housing affordability, demonstrated by the answers to questions we asked today on housing affordability in this place, is astounding. We had last year the first ever rental affordability index, and it revealed that there is a deep crisis in rental accommodation right across Australia. In fact, many Australians who are renting are paying 65 per cent of their total weekly wage towards rent. If that is a crisis that those opposite want to ignore then again it just shows how ignorant they are when it comes to the actual facts around what is going on.

Of course, the worst hit are low-income earners, and now that crisis of rental affordability is spreading to middle-income earners. Coupled with that, we also see now a decline in the new housing market. Fewer Australians are able to afford a house. And why? Because almost half the houses sold in Australia now are going to speculators, because the negative gearing and capital gains tax policies that are in place are way too generous. They are distorting the market. Those two levers are under the direct control of the federal government, and they sit on their hands. In fact, housing affordability has got much worse under the Turnbull government. They have never had a housing minister and they have never had a housing policy. Despite the very early promises of Mr Kevin Andrews that there would be one, there has never been one, and those are absolute facts.

Then they try to say that Labor's very solid negative gearing policy—which will come into effect, if we are in government, in 2017 and which will grandfather people who already have houses; it will apply to the new housing market—is somehow skewed. What is skewed is the Turnbull government trying to pretend in this place that somehow housing affordability in this country is someone else's responsibility. When they sit on the two levers that are directly impacting the housing market in this country, that is pure ignorance.

Labor will act to do something about making sure that low-income and middle-income earners can at least afford to live. When you pay more than 30 per cent of your household income in a mortgage or rent, you are in stress. We have many, many Australians now paying 65 per cent of their income, so how do they afford to eat, to put fuel in their car or to get on? The simple answer to that is that they do not; they fail to make ends meet.

The other point that you never hear those opposite talk about is that those incentives that are currently there for negative gearing and the capital gains discount are costing our economy $10 billion. That is more than we spend in education or child care. They should hold their heads in shame, but we know that they would rather enable people to buy their seventh or eighth house than help people in to buy their first house, or indeed help those who are currently struggling with rental affordability.

It is worse than them doing nothing. They sit on the two big levers that they are doing nothing about. The Treasurer has absolutely no idea what is happening on the tax front. Not only that—they trashed, burned and cancelled the good policies that Labor had in place to keep, particularly, rental in place. The capital gains tax concession is growing at eight per cent a year. That is not a number to be proud of. That is making it much harder for ordinary Australians to have fair rents and to get into the housing market. That rate of growth at eight per cent is greater than the rate at which we fund research, our universities, our VET providers and our schools, and the government want to sit on their hands. And why is that? Because they only look after their rich mates—their mates at the big end of town. That is who is being advantaged here, and meanwhile they try to pretend that the Australians in rental stress, paying huge amounts in rent, are somehow somebody else's problem. Those two levers—capital gains and negative gearing—are completely within their control, and they are having this internal fight—'Will we or won't we?' They are absolutely ignorant when it comes to housing affordability, and they should be ashamed. (Time expired)