Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this matter which is clearly an issue of public urgency—the need to rein in tax breaks that are overheating our housing marking and to work to see APRA cut investor lending, as it has historically. The truth is simple in relation to housing in this country—if this government put people first and exercised every possible tool in the toolbox, this housing crisis could be dealt with.

We could assist those many thousands of Australians—so many of them young people—feeling enormous anxiety about their opportunity to ever get into homeownership. Instead, we see a tsunami of investor activity distorting the very purpose of housing in this country. Instead of homes giving people shelter and safety, housing is being treated as a speculative investment vehicle. It has been turned into an asset for wealth accumulation. It's no longer the key first plank of economic security in our country—that is, a roof over your head—and it's getting worse.

Investor loans have reached a record high this year. They now account for more than 40 per cent of total new loans, up from just 25 per cent in 2020. When investor demand outpaces owner-occupier demand like this, you don't just get more buyers; you get a bidding war. First home buyers are losing, and they are feeling it every weekend in every city and too many towns across our country. This surge in investor demand doesn't just push prices up; it locks in expectations of future growth and fuels ever more speculative buying. House prices are now forecast to rise by nine per cent next year, and that's on top of six per cent already this year. This is causing enormous anxiety across our country for young people.

Labor is making things worse. Labor's policies are exacerbating the problem. Their five per cent deposit scheme, designed to be an assistance to first home buyers, is now unleashing a wave of first home buyers and investors competing for the same small group of properties, driving up the price of housing in October alone by more than one per cent. This is not just an economic imbalance; it's a moral one, because housing is a human right. Having a roof over your head is a human right. It's critical to having a safe life and a base from which to work, to build a family and to have a community. First home buyers simply don't stand a chance in a market that's rigged in favour of wealthy, tax-subsidised investors.

We have tools in our toolbox to deal with this—and we must—and APRA is holding some of them. APRA has intervened before. Between 2014 and 2018 it put the handbrake on investor lending growth. In this crisis, that's a tool we need right now. That period saw more loans flow to owner-occupiers, and prices stabilised to the slowest period for house price growth in over 30 years. It worked, and we can do it again. We can stabilise house price growth through actions like the possibilities available to APRA, and this urgency motion calls for exactly that.

We need the Treasurer to direct APRA to reinstate tighter macroprudential controls on investor lending before prices get even further out of control. We cannot simply leave it to market forces when they are manifestly failing. We can't leave it to the banks, who are profiting from a reckless amount of high-risk investor lending, including through trusts and other devices that avoid the lending buffer and feed the bubble.

At the same time, we must address the unfair tax system—the billions in tax breaks flowing to property investors through negative gearing and the capital gains discount. These are enormous distortions in our market. They must be reined in. We must make sure housing returns to being a roof over the head, not a way of accumulating wealth by very wealthy people who, in so many cases, already own multiple homes. If we do not act, we condemn another generation to being renters for life—to being locked out while the wealthy investors keep investing and receiving enormous tax breaks to buy more and more property.

Question negatived.