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

We'll hear a lot about the Australian dream tonight, and I have to say, this government has done more to destroy the Australian dream than any other government in our history, and over the course of these four years they've had three housing gimmicks. The first housing gimmick was the Housing Future Fund, which has 10 billion bucks, and it built virtually no houses. It's been going around buying houses that other Australians could actually live in. The second gimmick was five per cent deposits. This is a grotesque scheme which has pump-primed house prices at the bottom end for younger Australians. The Prime Minister said there would be a 0.6 per cent increase in house prices over six years; we got a six per cent increase in six months. So this guy can't count. That's been a disaster. Now the third gimmick is going to be the big lie that fiddling around with taxes is going to fix the housing system.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer must be honest tonight and say they believe that these tax increases will fix the housing crisis or materially change it. If they do not, why on Earth would they be lumping more taxes onto housing? Fifty per cent of the cost of a new house goes in government charges, fees and taxes. This is the last thing we need to see more taxes on. It's pretty simple: more tax equals fewer houses.

So those are the three gimmicks we've seen so far. Then we've seen a criminal failure to follow through on their promises, including red tape reduction, the National Construction Code—they've made that more convoluted and complex, not easier—and the EPBC Act, which they've also made more complex and convoluted. And Minister Watt has given himself God-like powers, where he sets the rules, he makes the laws of the land, rather than the parliament, and he's done no bilateral deals with the states. He's made none of the regulations. Instead of there being 26,000 houses ensnarled in EPBC, there are now 100,000 houses. So, as for the economic summit that we had last year, where Mr Chalmers or Dr Chalmers—whatever he calls himself now—had a talkfest in the cabinet room here, there's been no follow-through. So when we hear tonight these promises about how 'we're going to fix the housing system'—I mean, give me a break.

They promised they were going to get 75,000 more people into housing over 10 years, but that wouldn't even make up for the 120,000 deficit in supply that they have given the Australian people over these last four years. At the end of the day, they've been in government for four years. They've wasted almost $80 billion on housing to build 30,000 fewer houses a year. Who could believe that the government could be so inept as to commit $80 billion of taxpayer funds to build fewer houses than the last government?

Meanwhile, they have allowed 1.4 million people to migrate to Australia and have built only 600,000 houses at the same time. So they don't even model the impact of not building houses but allowing a lot of people in. When we have asked these questions at Senate estimates, Minister Gallagher has laughed and snarled at me for even suggesting that maybe it's a good idea to get the Treasury guys to say, 'Let's model the impact of having 1.4 million people come in and only building half a million houses.' Apparently I'm an idiot for asking for that modelling. Well, I don't think that's an unreasonable request, frankly.

At the end of the day, we all want the government to be the best government they can be. The problem is that we don't see any signs that they are learning from these failures. They haven't learnt that building bureaucracies and all this garbage in Canberra doesn't actually build houses. What you need to do is work out exactly what red tape you can get rid of and exactly which taxes you can cut, streamline or reduce. Instead, what we are going to hear tonight is, 'We've got a magic plan to impose more taxes on housing, which is going to magically create more houses.' When you look at the scoreboard, it's just not believable that these guys are ever going to have a plan that's going to get the country where it needs to be, which is at a quarter of a million houses a year. A quarter of a million houses a year is what we need. We used to get 200,000 houses a year under the last coalition government. Now, we get 170,000 houses a year under this government. That is ultimately going to be the metric upon which this government is measured, because on all the other metrics they have put out there they have failed.

If the government want to break their promises they have made, they will increase taxes. That's a political thing they have to live with. But the real impact is going to be on the people that aren't going to have a house because this government is so incompetent and hopeless.