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

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026. This bill is a massive shake-up. It is the biggest shake-up of our tax system in a generation, and it strikes at the heart of this toxic relationship between capital gains tax and negative gearing, an interaction that came about through the Howard government back in 1999. It led to a complete decoupling of salaries from house prices. It was meant to divert capital into the share market and into productive activity, and, instead, it turned housing from a human right into a speculative asset. Add 15 years of cheap credit, and the whole thing detonated.

In 1999, it cost around four times your median salary to buy a house. Fast forward to now, and we now have a situation where it costs around eight times. However, it's very much location specific. In places like Melbourne, it's about eight times your median salary. In Sydney, however, it's 10 times the median salary. These cities are now in the impossibly unaffordable category. That's a message. The average age of a first home buyer in 1999 was in their late 20s. It's now 34 to 36. Westpac reports, this year, that one in five people who are applying for first homeownership loans are actually 40 years and over. Just think about that—40 years and over and one in five. That tells you that people are actually ageing into housing. This has a multiplicity of knock-on effects. It has a detrimental effect on whether people have relationships, settle down and have children. Is it any wonder then that our fertility rate is in freefall? It currently stands at 1.7, which I'm told is actually not bad for Australia, but it should be 2.1 and above if we are to remain a vibrant community. Something has got to give.

We can continue to admire this problem, or we can do something about it. This Labor government is administering the bitter medicine that this country has needed for a very long time in order to save the patient—in order to restore hope to a generation of young people who have lost hope when it comes to housing. We've created a generation of people in this country who believe that they are going to be lifelong renters, and that's not good enough. We don't accept that status quo.

These changes will mean that negative gearing is now limited to new residences—new homes. We believe that these changes will result in 75,000 homes moving from property investors to owner-occupiers. And, yes, the modelling does suggest that there will be some reduction in new house builds of around 35000, but this is being more than offset by our $47 billion package which is designed to boost housing supply, cut red tape and skill up more tradies in construction. On the supply side, we have ring fenced 100,000 new builds just for first home buyers, and these deals are starting to be done with the state governments. The first one was in South Australia. We've also, in this budget, allocated $2 billion for enabling infrastructure. This means money for things like powerlines, pipes and pavements so that new builds can be fast-tracked.

We know that there is more to do, but this certainly builds on the already ambitious housing agenda that we brought in in our first term. As you know, the five per cent home deposit scheme has been incredibly successful. Over 250,000 people have entered the housing market as a result of this, 81,000 of them in regional communities. We've also introduced the Help to Buy scheme, which is really targeted for people on modest incomes, and we continue to restrict foreign investors from purchasing existing homes until mid-2029. All of these measures are designed to boost housing supply and enable people to get into homeownership with a smaller deposit.

Now, thanks to these taxation changes—changes to capital gains tax as well as negative gearing—we are ironing out the distortions that have turned housing into a speculative asset and seen this absolute boom or explosion in house prices and a legacy of unaffordability for the next generation. We are already seeing change, with a market adjustment occurring. This $12 trillion housing market is taking a bit of a haircut right now, but it turns out that the sky is not falling in. Twelve trillion—that's how much this housing market is.

These changes have actually been backed by the Australian people. A Resolve poll taken a couple of days ago showed that 54 per cent of people backed in these changes, and support for the cooling of property prices was actually seen across every single income bracket—low, medium and high income. Support was highest amongst 18- to 34-year-olds, and that's telling, because that is the very group these measures are designed to target, and they get it. So do their parents. So do their grandparents. There is a growing awareness in the community that the status quo is untenable. That is really at the heart of this budget.

The revenue raised by these measures and by ironing out this distortion will be diverted into other important programs. Let's not forget Medicare. Medicare is the reason I, as a former doctor, sit on this side of the house rather than that side of the house. With respect to Medicare, there are a whole lot of things going on. Among my favourites—it's like picking your favourite child—is making permanent Medicare urgent care clinics. All 137 that we promised have now been delivered, and these urgent care clinics have been visited by 3.1 million Australians. A third of them are children. They're open from early till late. They are often staffed by local GPs from the community, and all you need is your Medicare card. You do not need your credit card. They are fully bulk-billed.

We've also seen an investment in hospitals, with an additional $25 billion going into our hospital system. I spent my whole career, my whole life, working in public hospitals. These are really busy places. They are constantly under pressure, so that additional money will be welcome. It will be welcome, but it is not enough. The real action happens in the community, and that's why we are strengthening Medicare by boosting bulk-billing. The best way to reduce pressure on hospitals is to actually improve access to GPs and make it cheaper—in fact, make it free. That is what we're doing. With our record investment of $8½ billion in Medicare at the end of last year—this injection into Medicare—we have seen a huge uplift in bulk-billing, in the order of five to six percentage points across the country—in some places, like the Northern Territory, 13 percentage points. What that means is that we now have 3,800 general practices around the country that are bulk billing. That far exceeds our timelines and our expectations, so it is working.

That's not all we're doing. In this budget, we had an additional $3 billion towards aged care, where we are delivering more beds and more packages and we're making those personal care services—like showering, for example—free. We also have additional investment into dementia care, with the establishment of more specialist dementia care units. This is incredibly important. As our population ages, more people will develop dementia. But dementia is not a homogeneous condition. There is a great deal of variation within dementia. Yes, Alzheimer's is the most common, but there are other types. In most severe cases, elders with dementia who have behaviours of concern are the most challenging patients to manage. They are often rejected by aged-care facilities and, unfortunately, very often end up in hospitals, which are not suited to care for dementia patients. This additional investment will help families and relieve carer stress, particularly for women who bear the brunt of that stress.

In addition, we have established a new tax cut for all working Australians. It's called the working Australian tax offset. It means that around 14 million working Australians will receive an additional $250 in their pocket. That's on top of a $1,000 tax deduction, with no receipts needed. and five tax cuts in total, which means that the average worker is now $2,800 better off. Labor is the party of lower taxes.

This budget also has a large package of around $13 billion to go towards strengthening fuel security. Off the back of this oil crisis—this oil shock—we need to do more at home, so we will be extending our liquid fuel reserves to 50 days. This is on top of the additional $1.1 billion we're putting towards developing new low-carbon fuels—like biodiesel, for example—that come from the stuff our farmers grow, such as sorghum, canola, wheat, and even the waste products like tallow, biomass and so on. It's an innovative lens on our fuel security needs, and Australia is well placed to take advantage of that.

Finally, this budget also establishes the national resilience and science council. I'm particularly interested in this. Off the back of multiple crises like COVID, the fuel shock and the regional wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, I think all Australians realise that we are not immune or insulated from geopolitical shocks and shifts and that we have been far too vulnerable to what happens a million miles away from us. The establishment of this national resilience and science council will be there to inform government at the highest level, from the Prime Minister down, on what's coming our way and how we can better insulate and better protect ourselves. That means investing in the shock absorbers: housing, health care, the skills and smarts of our people.

There's a whole lot of work in this budget around strengthening our scientific and innovative capability, because the only way we can grow the pie in this country and the only way we can reach that future prosperity is by playing the long game. To play the long game, you must make the investments now and then hold steady over 10, 15 or 20 years so that we can build up those companies. We can take research and development from our world-leading, world-class institutions and universities and carry them through multiple valleys of death and then commercialise them and take them to market. That creates jobs. That creates exports. That creates the multiplier effect. And there are a number of measures in this budget that support that ecosystem.

I commend this bill to the House.