Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

For many young Australians, homeownership has shifted from being a milestone in adulthood to a distant aspiration. That Australian dream is crumbling in front of their eyes, and you can look at the evidence. Let's look at that evidence. The average age now for a first home buyer is 34 years to 36 years, ballpark. In the 1990s, it was in the late 20s. If you look at the graphs, it has been ratcheting up over the last 40 years. What has happened is that we have seen a decoupling of house prices from salaries. They completely diverged. They diverged under the Howard government, thanks to that interaction between negative gearing and capital gains tax. It supercharged it. After pouring on low debt, the whole thing exploded.

If you look at another metric, another piece of evidence, we're seeing that the national house-price-to-income ratio has rocketed over the last 50 years. In 1985, it was three to four times. That means it took around three to four years to be able to own a home. The national house-price-to-income ratio is now eight to nine times. In Sydney, it is 13 times. When it hits the eight to nine times, it's unaffordable. When it goes to extremely unaffordable, when it goes to 13 times, I don't think we have any language to describe that.

That is the evidence, but you don't need to look at the evidence, necessarily. You can just look at the faces of young Australians. They have lost hope. The longer they rent, the less chance they have of feeling secure and growing wealth, the longer they may stay with their parents in the family home and the less chance they have of meeting someone and maybe settling down and having children. Then we wonder why our fertility rate is in freefall.

This is at the heart of the budget—housing affordability. It is writ large across the sky. This is the issue, and I am done admiring this problem. This Labor government is acting. We are acting in the interests of millions of young Australians, and we have to. The moment is now, and we will fight this out with the coalition, who have said today that they may repeal these changes going into the next election, turning their backs on millions of young Australians who, by the way, are not an island. Those young people live with parents. They live with grandparents. They are connected to their communities; they are connected to their workplaces. Those older Australians are watching what we do in this chamber.

I speak as someone who is a property investor, but I bought my properties at a time when I thought governments were doing their job. I thought governments were investing in housing supply. Unbeknownst to me, over that period when the coalition was in power, they vacated the field. There wasn't even a housing minister for six of their 10 years. No money was put towards housing supply. It's taken this Labor government to invest $47 billion in increasing housing supply. That's the highest it's ever been in Commonwealth history. So, while we take the heat out of the property investment market, we also have to boost supply. (Time expired)