Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I withdraw that. We call that claim untrue, because what is unfair to younger Australians is the fact that people under 35 only get four per cent of the benefit of the most generous tax break on the books and older people and wealthier people, who've had multiple opportunities to buy up investment properties or to buy up other assets, get so much of the benefit. That is what is unfair. What is unfair to young people is that an entire generation is being priced out of the housing market in this country. This will not resolve that, but it will take a baby step in the right direction.

Let's be very clear. The current capital gains tax arrangements were opposed by the Australian Greens when they were introduced in 1999, and we have been campaigning against those arrangements ever since. We have been campaigning for a generation against the overly generous capital gains tax discount arrangements. Finally we are getting a small step in the right direction. A lot of that is because we used this parliament, where Labor has a stonking majority in the House, where Labor plus the Greens equals the numbers in the Senate and where the Liberals and the coalition are a rabble, to prosecute yet again the case to repeal the capital gains tax discount.

We used the committee inquiry that we established with a Greens chair to bring in a whole bunch of people and organisations and voices to call time on this unfair tax break. The BCA, the Business Council of Australia, and the CommBank CEO started lining up with ACOSS and housing organisations, paving the way for change through our inquiry. We made clear to the government that we stand ready to take advantage of this once-in-a-political-generation opportunity to fix the housing crisis and actually give young people a fair crack at the great Australian dream of owning their own homes.

What happened? Labor squibbed the opportunity. They abjectly failed to step up and show the courage and ambition that are necessary to resolve the housing crisis. They've done that by prioritising tax breaks for wealthy property investors over renters and young people trying to buy their first home. They left $33 billion of tax breaks on the table. People with two or more investment properties own a collective 1.7 million dwellings between them, and, at its most extreme, people with seven or more investment properties own 94,000 homes and claimed $1.9 billion in tax deductions. Labor chose that group of people, that tiny group of superwealthy people, over the seven million renters in Australia.

To put Labor's abject failure of courage and ambition into context—Treasury expects about 75,000 new first home buyers over the next decade or so. If Labor had stepped up and taken the kind of action we need to see, we could have had hundreds of thousands of homes available for renters and prospective first home buyers in the next few years alone. That would have been meaningful. That would have been an appropriate response to a housing crisis which is ripping our social fabric apart. But Labor failed to do that because they failed to show the ambition that was necessary.

This is now Labor's housing crisis. Young people and people who are watching the great Australian dream of owning their own home disappear off in the distance need to understand quite clearly the message that Labor is sending: Labor is not going to fix this housing crisis. Labor now owns the housing crisis, and the only party that is prepared to do the things necessary to fix the housing crisis in this country is the Australian Greens.

Young Australians are watching property investors keep all the tax breaks for as long as they like. For as long as they want to hold on to their properties, they'll keep the negative gearing benefits, and they'll keep the capital gains tax discount of 50 per cent up until 1 July next year. Young Australians are just going to have to cop it and wait. If they're saving up for a property, they'll have to wait patiently for investors to get bored of their tax breaks or to have their financial circumstances change and to sell up.

Treasury told the Greens led Senate inquiry into the capital gains tax discount that the average time that an investment property is held is nine years, so we're going to have to wait on average nearly a decade for these changes to wash through in any significant form. That's a decade-long wait for a bit of fairness in the housing market. It didn't have to be this way. The grandparenting or locking in of these tax perks could have been constrained to one investment property, not extended to people with five or 15 or 50 or 100 investment properties.

The words of former Treasury secretary Ken Henry to the Greens' capital gains tax inquiry when he was asked about grandfathering bear repeating: 'I hate it,' he said. To quote Saul Eslake's testimony, it 'privileges people, in essence, on the basis of when they were born or when they took particular decisions.'