Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I raise an issue that is of particular importance in this country. It is of importance generally and it is of importance because of a speech the Prime Minister made recently, where he talked about Australia’s population increasing to 35 million. It is of particular importance to people of my generation and younger who seek to buy or build their first home. What I aim to do tonight is to mount a defence of the Australian suburb, suburbia in general, and the aspiration to buy or build your own home on your own block of land as you see fit in an affordable way—because it seems to have become particularly unfashionable. People talk of urban sprawl. Issues such as environmental concerns, costs to government and the provision of social and economic infrastructure are raised and we now hear of climate change and the so-called obesity epidemic, all of which require us to restrict the growth of our suburbs and to control the way people choose to buy or build their own homes.

The advocates of constraining the continued development of our suburbs are varied but they fail to appreciate that this is an aspiration for many Australians. Decades of record levels of home ownership in Australia attest to this, as do the hundreds of thousands of people from around the world who are attracted to Australia—one of the main reasons being the lifestyle in our cities and in our suburbs.

Robert Menzies realised it was a core Australian aspiration when he said in 1942:

The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving ... one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will.

The Australian pattern of homeownership based on our suburbs and on new suburban development is something we should be proud of. It has been affordable. It has given millions of people the opportunity to build a secure financial base for themselves and their families and, even more importantly, lead the lifestyle they choose.

To allow the generation that has benefited from past investment in our suburbs and their own lifestyles to deny the same opportunities to future Australians is profoundly wrong, especially when the justification is based on nothing more than that generation’s utopian dream to create a perfect society. It is being driven by a desire to constrain the choices of our fellow Australians. In this the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty it is a sign of the times, sadly, that the modern utopians and authoritarians seeks to use the language of choice and the market to constrain the choices of others. The principle that actions should only be limited if they harm others has been used perniciously in this debate.

Just as the discussion of the so-called externality of congestion is used to justify a congestion tax and to charge people to move around our own cities and infringe a most basic freedom—that of movement—we hear of the externalities of transport costs, infrastructure costs, and indeed now even health and environmental costs, being used to justify denying the opportunities that some have had to others: the opportunity to choose and own an affordable home in an Australian suburb. The modern utopian society for some is apparently one where we all live in high-density, small-geographic-footprint buildings crowded on top of one another. But just like other utopian dreams it is based on some people denying others the choices they themselves enjoy.

I do not deny that we need to dramatically improve our planning processes and, indeed, our outcomes. It was ironic that the Prime Minister made this speech recently, when it was over the last 10 years of Labor state governments in most of our states, and indeed in my home state of Victoria, that the wheels fell off, almost literally, especially when it comes to transport. The problem is not with low-density cities; it is with our failure to plan for them. We have had a home affordability issue in this country, but it is one that has been created by government policy, and it has been primarily government policy at the state level. Artificial constraints on the release of land over decades, combined with substantial population growth, have driven up the price of the largest component of a new home: the land value. This has been compounded by state government levied charges forcing the price even higher.

And what has been the justification of this? Well, it started out being infrastructure provision. But this is nothing short of a fallacy. Over the last decade our state governments have benefited from record, unprecedented revenues—particularly from taxes derived from land, and particularly from taxes derived from residential land. The stamp duty on a median-priced Melbourne home is now over $20,000. Like many, I was raised in suburbs that were established before my parents bought their first home. I bought my first home in an established suburb. It has good infrastructure—good roads, public transport in various forms, schools and the like. Just as these suburbs have been the beneficiaries of past investment by government and past taxes that people have paid—and groups like the board of works, the tramways board and railways Victoria in my home state—the record levels of stamp duty paid today should be funding the required development in our new suburbs. But this has not been undertaken. There has not been a new train line built in Melbourne since the 1930s. Over the last 10 years, despite record patronage growth and record population growth, and recovering from both the disastrous Cain and Kirner administrations, my home city of Melbourne has not seen a new publicly funded freeway or any substantial investment in public transport.

When we look at the lack of infrastructure in our new suburbs, the failure rests solely with our state governments over the past decade. Dr Bob Birrell has outlined that my own home city of Melbourne has ‘literally boundless plains to share’ for development for people to buy houses, but it appears that government does not want to share them. Our state governments are drawing artificial lines around our cities, making housing more expensive than it needs to be. When we consider the housing affordability challenge, it is obtuse and ignorant not to look at this as the first and most important source of the problem. We should be striving for cheap housing. Very few countries in the world have the capacity to provide it that Australia does, as we did for many decades until recently.

The problem is that the current debate is being dominated by people trying to solve various social problems that they choose to prioritise at the expense of the choices their fellow Australians want to make. They condemn the suburbs as car dominated, again claiming that the cheap, private transport that the car made available to millions is more of a problem when the reality is that it revolutionised the lives of those who previously did not have the freedom to travel and move around as they saw fit. A truly modern planning arrangement would allow this choice. It would allow people to choose the inner suburbs. It would allow people to choose the outer suburbs. It would allow people to prioritise the lifestyle they saw fit for themselves and their families. I live in the inner suburbs. My friends live in the outer suburbs. It reflects our own personal priorities. We should not have artificially constrained cities dominated by high- and medium-density housing purely because of government decisions. Unless something is done to address this, with the population growth that is forecast for this country and the policies of governments primarily at the state level at the moment, that is what we will see; and that does not reflect the aspirations or the wishes of most Australians.