Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Acting Deputy President. I'm regretting Senator Ayres leaving after that high-intellect contribution earlier!

Homeownership provides security in retirement. Homeownership provides the foundation that families need to have confidence to enlarge their families through having children or adopting children. Homeownership also provides the security to build communities and invest in communities. That's why the level of homeownership in Australia—not for a particular sector or a particular group of people but for all Australians—is so important. It's not just their financial health and wellbeing; it's the health of the nation.

Undoubtedly, homeownership is out of reach for too many Australians today, and this is an intergenerational failing. It's part of failings, I'll concede, on both sides of the aisle over probably two to three decades now. We have not been building enough homes. The problem with these sorts of schemes, whether it is the Housing Australia Future Fund or the Home Guarantee Scheme or the Help to Buy scheme, which is the subject of this disallowance motion, is that Labor's fixers are fuelling demand in certain sectors of the market, but all that does is push up prices. Perhaps the people they're helping today will get a foot on the property ladder, but they are pushing everyone who is not the beneficiary of this particular scheme on this particular day further down the ladder.

Fundamentally, every one of these policies has unintended consequences. We heard from the minister before that he recognises that supply is an issue. But, if that's the case, why aren't all these supply measures? They're all demand measures. The Help to Buy scheme, the Home Guarantee Scheme and the Housing Australia Future Fund—all we have is more government intervention in the market adding to demand.

When the coalition were last in office, we averaged—well, we weren't building the homes. We don't pretend that the government should be building homes. We think private capital and private investors and people who are seeking to build a home themselves should be building them. But home construction averaged 200,000 a year. Under Labor, so far it has averaged 170,000 a year. The most recent statistics from the ABS say that the number of new home constructions in the 2024-25 fiscal year is lower than in the 2023-24 fiscal year. In the first year of the housing compact, the housing targets, the Labor government is already 66,000 new home starts behind.

So it's all very well for the minister to say that this scheme will help nurses, cleaners, council workers or teachers. But, if all it is doing is pushing up prices for those nurses, for those council workers, for those teachers and for those cleaners and pushing up the prices for everyone else, then no-one is better off. At heart, philosophically, as a matter of policy, that is the problem with this government's approach to every issue. It's a reflexive reach for government intervention in a market. The first-order effects might seem positive, but the second- and third-order effects and unintended consequences are incredibly negative.

Take, for instance—I have to make sure I've got the names right—the home guarantee scheme. The home guarantee scheme is the deposit scheme. I think I've got this right. That was the home guarantee scheme, not the Help to Buy scheme, which we're talking about now. What we've seen since the home guarantee scheme commenced is, already, the biggest monthly rise in house prices across Australia in years. Cotality, the data collector and aggregator, confirmed that the strongest growth seen in housing prices was in the lower and middle quartiles of the housing market, the sorts of properties that first home buyers are targeting. Cotality research director Tim Lawless said this price growth was due to 'likely a pick-up in first home buyers taking advantage of the expanded deposit guarantee'. So what we've got with the home guarantee scheme and what we will soon have with the Help to Buy scheme is the government basically putting more money into people's pockets to purchase homes without creating any new homes. If you've got more money chasing a finite or fixed supply of goods, or even if you've got money growing at a faster rate than supply is, that is what constitutes inflation. Just today, we saw the monthly inflation figure at 3.8 per cent. Do you know why monthly inflation figures are so high? It's because real government spending is growing at four times the rate of the economy. Real government spending, four times the rate of the economy.

That macro picture is being replicated here at the micro level, at a sectoral level, in the housing sector. We have got more government money going into a sector without doing anything to address the supply side. We've got the so-called Housing Australia Future Fund. That is the supply-side measure. That's what's meant to be building homes. All we've got so far from the HAFF is that they have 'completed' 889 homes but they've failed to disclose, or refused to disclose, whether these homes had been built by the HAFF or had been acquired. When we last got a concrete figure on this from the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, she revealed, at last year's Senate estimates, that the HAFF had built zero homes—absolute doughnut. Instead, it had acquired—that is, it had bought or purchased—340 homes. So the HAFF scheme, the supply-side scheme, is only operating on the demand side of the market. We've got the home guarantee scheme on the demand side of the market. And now we've got—I've got to remember these names—the Help to Buy scheme, also only operating on the demand side of the market.

I can't be any clearer than this. More government intervention on the demand side is not the answer. All that will do is drive up prices further. Just as government intervention in other parts of the economy fuels inflation and pushes up prices, that is exactly what this scheme will do.

This disallowance motion is directed at the Help to Buy scheme, predominantly because the scheme seeks to exempt itself from the National Credit Code. The National Credit Code is there for a reason. It's there to protect consumers, and it's there to protect Australian financial interests. The regulatory agency ASIC knows that it was and has always been the intention of the parliament for the code to apply to credit provided by the Crown. The Crown is providing credit in this instance, and we in the coalition believe that this scheme should be subject to the normal oversight that applies to credit instruments in all their entirety.

Debate interrupted.