Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

The Australian Greens will also not be supporting the amendments moved by Senator Chandler on behalf of the opposition. But I want to offer some general reflections on the legislation and, in particular, the splitting of the bill. Let's be very clear about this. The government has put this forward as a package, and it's very interesting to watch attempts to split various pieces out of this legislation because the interaction of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount is significant. With regard to the way those two tax breaks operate, the Greens have been very clear that we want to see substantial reform of both of those tax breaks with far higher ambition than the government has shown in this package. But folks who don't understand how they interact in real life, in reality, are missing the obvious point: if you are going to engage in reform of either the capital gains tax arrangements or negative gearing arrangements, it should be done together at the same time simply because of how they interact.

Today is a massive missed opportunity for renters and first home buyers. Labor's gift of $33 billion of continued handouts to wealthy property speculators means that this country's housing crisis will be worse than it needs to be for longer than it should be. The real issue here is that the test for Labor is whether this legislation will fix Australia's housing crisis for people struggling to buy their first home. The clear answer is that it will not—because Labor has shown a lack of ambition and a lack of political courage. The housing crisis in Australia is now Labor's housing crisis. They've made it worse since they came to office four years ago, and they have spurned chance after chance to try to repair it and bring some real hope to people who are struggling to buy their first homes. Those people are, overwhelmingly, young Australians. They are stuck in a skyrocketing rental market where rents are soaring out of control and becoming ever more unaffordable and where they are watching house prices recede into the distance—and have been for some time.

We need to make housing more affordable for people who are struggling to buy their first home. We need to cap rents and stop out-of-control rent rises. Those are the policy levers that are available and that Labor has chosen not to pull. Young Australians are watching the drawbridge being pulled up in front of their eyes, and cheering from the battlements are the older people who have the tax advantages that have allowed them to accumulate, in some cases, massive portfolios of investment property, and, ultimately, those benefits and those tax changes will be significantly grandfathered in by this legislation. So it's no surprise that young people are not cheering.

There's a bigger issue here, and that is the way that income derived from labour, from going to work, is taxed as opposed to income that is derived from capital. I'll make the obvious point that, in order to derive income from capital, you have to be wealthy enough to buy things in the first place. For millions of Australians, the dream of share ownership or the dream of an investment property is just that. It's something they can never legitimately aspire to, because they simply don't have the wealth necessary to buy into the share market or to buy an investment property, or 10 or 20 or 50 investment properties. Why should we tax income from work so much less advantageously for people than income derived from buying and selling things? There is no good argument. Under current arrangements, if you go to work as a cleaner or in hospo or as a carpenter or a plumber or a nurse, you are paying double the tax on the same amount of money as someone who makes their profits by buying and selling investment properties. That is the system that we've got, and this legislation, while it will make some difference and is—