Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

I take the interjection. We believe in the idea that government programs should target the people that need it. We do not believe that programs funded by hardworking taxpayers, when you've got a massive burden on the working Australian, maybe the highest we've ever had—this comes from a government that reintroduced a 37c tax bracket in the last parliament. You've got to be very careful with how you spend people's money. I would say that subsidising the children of billionaires is not a good priority.

On priorities: of all the things for this government to do on housing, they chose something put forward by their mates at the big super funds and the big investors: 'I know! Let's give a tax cut to foreign fund managers so they can build and own houses in perpetuity that Australians will never own. We will dress it up as a build-to-rent measure.' In reality, it is cutting the withholding tax rate for foreign asset managers. What a warped and bizarre priority. When we did the inquiry into this bill, we asked the home-building association, the people who actually build houses in Australia, or used to build houses, where this priority would sit. Do you know what they said? 'It wouldn't be in our top 20.' The home-building association say that it would not be in their top 20. There you go.

This issue, a tax cut for Labor's big-end-of-town mates, has become the priority for the government. They now want to have a system where Australians never, ever own a house. Anyone who went to the economic summit last week with Mr Chalmers would have found that, in fact, a lot of the time was taken up by the big super funds trying to get the government to find dodgy ways for them to own and build more and more houses. Their Australian dream is for super funds to own your house, not for you to own your house.

That's the reality of this government. They believe that institutional investors should own houses. They don't give a rats that there are cities like Atlanta and cities in other parts of the US where 25 or 30 per cent of the houses are owned by institutional investors. That's what they want for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. They want Cbus, BlackRock and AustralianSuper to own the houses in Australia. That is the Labor dream. The party of organised capital now wants to impose this disgusting idea on the Australian people. In fact, they've never liked the idea of individual Australians owning their own houses. If you go back into the annals of time, you'll find Labor ministers in the postwar period talking about not wanting to have Australians owning their own houses, because we don't want them to be little capitalists. That is the history of the Labor movement. Frankly, this is just more of the same.

We hear from ASFA, the super association, saying—

Government senators interjecting—