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

I will take the opportunity to clarify what was said before by Senator Ruston, and that is that we will not be supporting One Nation's motion in relation to this matter; we will be moving amendments, so I encourage senators to listen carefully, if they can. The main point I want to make, for the record, is that, for those who wish to link the housing issue with migration, it is a very one-dimensional approach, and it is not the main driver of the housing problem. It is not a reasonable argument to be blaming migrants for what is a homegrown problem here in Australia. Not only is it wrong based on the numbers but, I think, it's also morally wrong, and it is not providing the sort of leadership that Australians are looking for. Australians are very decent people, and most of us are migrants of some form in recent decades. We all, in the main, know that migrants have not created this housing crisis. They know that. It is the case that if you have high levels of migration and a collapse in housing supply, that that can be a factor. It is also the case that very high migration settings, as we've seen in the past few years, have been a contributing factor to the housing issue. But the housing issue is one of supply.

The only way out of the housing issue is to build more houses. There is no other formulation that we can conjure that is going to solve our massive problem. Unfortunately, for Australia, this government is in the process of spending $60 billion to give the country fewer houses than we had under the prior government.

The government inherited a housing system which was supplying 200,000 houses a year on average. Now we're back to 170,000 houses a year on average. Despite all the bureaucracy and bluster, we are sadly receiving fewer homes. That is the scoreboard. That is how many houses are being built. It looks like it will be about 175,000 houses again this year. They're not very good numbers.

More broadly, the government's main flagship housing fund has had $10 billion and two years. It has built a handful of houses and purchased some. So the supply record, unfortunately, is not too flash. What I would say, as another linkage point, is that if you are running a large migration program, you'll be looking to bring in people who can help you build houses. The government has not done that. I think the government brought in 4,000 tradies on visas last year. There is an 80,000 shortfall in tradies needed to build houses. So what we should be looking to do is to bring in people who can help us build out of this mess that we're in, rather than demonise the people who want to make Australia their home. I think that is a more constructive approach.

There are a lot of different ways we can couch these issues, a lot of different ways to talk about them. My advice is that we should try and be constructive and be honest about the position we find ourselves in. If we were to cut migration to nothing tomorrow, we would still have a massive housing crisis. That is the reality that we face in Australia. Whatever our political desires may be, I think every Australian wants the government to get better at building houses and get better at helping the private sector get the supply moving—whether it's a private sector housing system, a public housing system or a social and affordable housing system. That's the key to understand.

I think there was a very good point made in the motion in relation to the perverse idea that we're going to get BlackRock and other foreign fund managers to build houses. I don't understand that at all. I don't understand why the government has thought it necessary to give foreign fund managers a tax cut to become corporate landlords. We don't want to be like Atlanta or other parts of the US; we don't want that. I think they will be better off doing their budget and finding something more constructive there, because that is not the way we want to be in Australia. We want to be a property-owning democracy. I think that's going to be the best way to go forward.