Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Housing Australia Amendment (Accountability) Bill 2025—a bill that is bad for housing, bad for Australians and bad for homeownership. In the middle of a housing crisis, the shadow minister for housing thinks it's a good idea to move a bill like this—a bill which seeks to allow the Senate to block housing reforms. Not content with spending the better part of 10 years of a coalition government doing nothing on housing, the Liberals spent the last three years in this parliament trying to block every single housing reform before this Senate, and we all know how that worked out for them. The Australian people showed the Liberals and their shadow minister the door at the last election for his personal antics on housing, along with the Greens spokesperson for housing. Both of them were shown the door at the last election.

They took an approach to housing policy at the last election that sought to do a number of things: cut the number of homes being built, scrap Labor's Housing Australia Future Fund, bulldoze tens of thousands of new and affordable homes, increase taxes on new and affordable rental properties and scrap the national $1.2 million housing target. In the first few months of the new parliament, they tried to bulldoze 80,000 new rental homes and rip up Labor's build-to-rent laws.

Now the Liberals are trying to rip up Labor's five per cent deposits. This bill specifically seeks to give the Senate the power to disallow the five per cent deposit scheme, to scrap the Help to Buy program and to trash the Housing Australia Future Fund. This will make it even harder for Australians to get a home of their own in this country.

Already, 220,000 Australians have bought their first home with a five per cent deposit under Labor's policy. In my home state of Queensland, more than 50,000 people have used our five per cent deposit scheme to buy their first home. That's 50,000 Queenslanders that Senator Bragg, the Liberals and the Greens want to disallow from owning their own home. They want to stop working people owning their own home, because they have some philosophical opposition to people buying a first home with a five per cent deposit. They think that you shouldn't be allowed to do that. They'd rather that young people, families, single parents—all of them—get slugged with a 20 per cent deposit. And if you can't get the hundreds of thousands of dollars together to meet a 20 per cent deposit, there're quite okay with you getting slugged $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 and sometimes $50,000 in lenders mortgage insurance.

Senator Bragg thinks he knows better than the 220,000 Australians who have used our five per cent deposit scheme. He thinks it's a bad thing that they get to be in a home of their own. He wants to join up with the Greens in demonising those Australians who have used the scheme to buy their first home. We know that, on average, Australians are paying $23,000 in lenders mortgage insurance to secure a home loan, but Senator Bragg and the Liberals are quite okay with Australians being slugged with a tax from the bank. He doesn't support initiatives to put money in the back pockets of first home owners so they can get into their first home sooner.

Imagine the arrogance of putting a bill like this to the chamber—a bill that ignores the dreams and aspirations of Australians to get into their own home. Imagine an opposition, or whatever they're called these days, who want to make Australians feel bad for aspiring to homeownership, for wanting something to call their own, and who tell them they're doing something wrong by not paying outrageous taxes from the banks.

These are the kinds of out-of-touch musings from a Liberal Party that has lost its way, a party of people who just can't stand the sight of each other—the kind of modern Liberal Party with a bunch of blokes disappearing into a room to decide the fate of their female leader, with two shadow ministers sneaking off to those meetings behind the leader's back. I've said it before: I'll tell you what they weren't talking about in that house in the Melbourne suburbs. They weren't talking about housing policy. They weren't talking about how to get people into their first home. They weren't talking about easing the burden for Australians. They were talking about how to get themselves—blokes—into a better corner office in this building. It's disgusting. Shame on them.

Now they think they can get a say on the housing policy of this country, a housing policy that the Australian public roundly and loudly endorsed at the last election. We know how they operate. They have years of bad form in this place, of blocking, delaying and bulldozing housing at every turn, so do not give them another chance to send Australia backwards.