Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate will now consider a proposal, under standing order 75, from Senator McKim, which is shown at item No. 14 of today's Order of Business:

The urgent need for the Treasurer to intervene and announce an end to property investor tax breaks, in order to cool runaway housing costs and, with housing costs the biggest contributor to the inflation spike, help mortgage holders and renters by reducing the likelihood of a series of interest rate rises.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The urgent need for the Treasurer to intervene and announce an end to property investor tax breaks, in order to cool runaway housing costs and, with housing costs the biggest contributor to the inflation spike, help mortgage holders and renters by reducing the likelihood of a series of interest rate rises.

In the face of a housing crisis that has locked out an entire generation from homeownership, Labor is choosing to tinker around the edges while locking in policies that make the problem worse. And it is a choice. While you're getting smashed by unlimited rent increases, massive mortgage repayments and today a rate rise, every year Labor is handing $12.3 billion to landlords. We live in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Everyone should be able to afford a home to own or to rent comfortably. Instead our government is choosing to waste billions on property investor tax perks, choosing to allow unlimited rent increases, choosing to allow the RBA to use interest rate rises as a hammer against mortgage holders and choosing to allow the big bank profits to soar even more instead of choosing to help people.

Politics should work for everyday people, but right now it doesn't. Both major parties are backing the profits of the banks and the ultrawealthy instead of doing what's necessary to make sure that young people can buy a home. There are seven million renters in this country, and millions of them would like to be homeowners. Everyone I know has a story about a young person being locked out. Our view, as the Greens, is that we should be backing them—to hell with the profits of the big banks. Australians have just copped an interest rate hike today because inflation has spiked. Why? Because the government hasn't done enough to deal with rising house prices and corporate price gouging.

If you're a mortgage holder or a renter, you're now being hit to solve the government's inflation problem. It shouldn't be on people to solve the government's inflation problem. Anyone with a mortgage will be giving even more every month to the big banks. Renters are going to cop it, as investors will pass on rate rises. It is hard enough right now to get ahead. You shouldn't be doing it even harder. It shouldn't be on you. Labor could put an end to negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, they could build more public and affordable homes, they could freeze and cap rents, and they could regulate the banks to deliver fairer, lower mortgages. Instead they're choosing to tinker around the edges of the housing crisis, and their policies are locking in price rises and locking out an entire generation from homeownership. It's not fair, and they need to fix it.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In addressing this urgency motion on housing, there are parts of it that we certainly would agree with, but in general—on a day that the RBA has had to increase interest rates because of government expenditure going to historic highs of almost 27 per cent, which is vastly higher than in the pre-COVID period, this is an embarrassment for a treasurer who said that there were going to be no more interest rate rises. The fact is that today's announcement by the Reserve Bank was a unanimous judgement by that board. What that means is that his own department secretary agrees with the rest of the RBA's directors that rates should go up. So it's a vote of no confidence in the Treasurer from his own department head today, and it's a vote of no confidence in the Australian economy, frankly. I feel for the many Australians that now have to pay much higher mortgages because of Canberra's mismanagement.

Looking at the motion before the chamber, housing inflation is a big problem. It's a serious problem. At 19 per cent, since Labor came to office, it is a big part of the housing problem that faces so many people. The government brag every day about how much money they're spending on housing. But guess what counts? What counts is what you get for the money. Most people would assume that, if you spend more money on something, you're going to get more stuff. This government spends 80 billion bucks on housing and gets fewer houses—$80 billion for fewer houses.

What you've also seen is a government presiding over a dearth in productivity growth, a collapse in productivity growth, in the housing sector. They have not sought to examine the issue of the CFMEU and other corrupt entities that are permeating and killing the sector. The CFMEU was apparently put out of business by the Prime Minister. But then we find, only weeks later, that they're expanding their operations into apartment building in New South Wales.

You've got Canberra building a massive housing bureaucracy, where Labor brags about spending billions and billions of dollars on housing, but we're getting fewer houses. We've gone from getting over 200,000 houses a year on average to now only 170,000 houses a year on average over the period of the Albanese government.

We see a huge inflation problem in the housing sector, a lack of productivity and a lack of will to address the corrupt Mafia elements that have permeated the housing system in Australia. Now all Australians have to pay the price of malfeasance, waste and mismanagement.

Many of the members of the Senate and the House like to talk about political issues because, of course, they are politicians. The Labor Party are very good at politics. They're very good at spin. They're probably the world's best politicians, okay? But they are the world's worst managers. The scoreboard doesn't lie. When you spend a lot of taxpayer funds, but you're getting less of something, that is a bad result for the Australian people. And the Australian people are feeling it. It's offensive to see the Minister for Housing and the Prime Minister walk around saying, 'We're giving people five per cent deposits. Fantastic. We've solved the housing crisis.' It is jarring, because what that scheme is doing, in an uncapped manner, is putting up house prices for younger people. House prices are too high in this country, particularly for younger people. It is impossible for a person on an average wage to buy a house in many of our capital cities now.

One of the reasons is these demand-side gimmicks brought to you by the Labor Party and the spin machine. The Labor Party would have workshopped, with their working groups and their polling shops, what their policies would be before they even knew what they were going to be, because they're more interested in the spin. The Prime Minister himself says he's more interested in having political fights than doing anything.

People take their opportunities and liberties to opine about the state of the opposition, as they are welcome to do, but this government is doing nothing. In fact, they're doing worse than nothing. They're actually taking the country backwards when it comes to housing. The Australian people feel it. They feel it because they know that younger people are seeing the Australian dream fall out of their reach.

Richard Dowling (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I don't think anybody denies there's a housing crisis in this country and we need to be extremely focused on addressing housing affordability. It's real, it's serious, and it's hurting Australians. But slogans don't build homes, and all this motion is is a slogan, not supply. The housing crisis wasn't created overnight. It was a generation in the making, driven by a decade of underbuilding, underinvestment and a Commonwealth that walked away from housing altogether. We just heard the Liberal spokesman claim that this government is doing nothing. How about having no housing minister? That is doing nothing. There's no focus at all.

The critical point missing from this motion is supply, not tweaking the tax code. If you don't build enough homes, prices go up. That is basic economics. I think everyone should understand and appreciate that, in the housing crisis, the No. 1 fundamental thing we cannot be distracted from is increasing supply. Tax settings matter at the margins, but supply determines outcomes at scale. Right now, Australia has a housing supply gap that measures in the hundreds of thousands of homes, and that gap was created long before this government took office.

Instead of press releases and protest politics, Labor is doing the hard work of rebuilding Australia's housing system. It's a $45 billion agenda, the most ambitious since World War II. It's more than eight times the coalition's investment when they were in office. There are 55,000 social and affordable homes underway as part of the $10 billion HAFF, 100,000 homes reserved exclusively for first home buyers under the Help to Buy scheme and a national ambition to deliver 1.2 million new homes, working with states, councils and industry. The latest data coming out of the ABS showed that the total number of dwellings approved in the last calendar year was up to 195,730, a 12.8 per cent increase since 2024. That's real progress in the numbers. There's an upward trend in approvals, including units, over the previous 12 months.

Crucially, we are backing ambition with action. We're training more tradies; funding enabling infrastructure; cutting red tape, including pausing the National Construction Code; fast-tracking environmental approvals; and scaling up modern construction. That's how you cool housing pressure sustainably—by increasing supply through targeted actions, not chasing headlines. The idea that a single tax switch would magically tame inflation or shield households from interest rate movements simply doesn't stack up. Even the proponents of changing some of these tweaks have acknowledged that you may, at best, impact prices by one to two per cent. It's not the main game, and it distracts us from the main game of building more homes. Housing costs are rising because there aren't enough homes, not because of one line in the tax code. The fastest, most durable way to ease pressure on renters and mortgage holders is to build more homes where people live and work. That's what this government is doing.

I'll make another point that, while our opponents and the Greens party talk a lot about housing and so-called tax breaks, they've taken too many opportunities to actually oppose housing, even in our state of Tasmania. I know that there was a proposal in 2024 where the Tasmanian Greens actually joined the Liberals to vote down a UTAS relocation that promised 2,000 new homes in Tasmania. The Liberals and the Greens teamed up in Tasmania to block 2,000 new homes. That would have been 2,000 affordable new homes right in the heart of Hobart, where you need them. Instead, they're here debating motions and slogans, opposing actual, tangible progress we could have had in Hobart to give people 2,000 critical and affordable new homes they need—proving, once again, that when it comes to housing, they talk urgency but vote delay.

In 2025, when Hobart needed more homes, the Greens opposed expanding the urban growth boundary, slowing the release of new land and pushing housing pressure back onto renters and first home buyers through tighter supply. We need to be embracing the YIMBY attitude—'yes in my backyard'—saying yes to more housing, not the NIMBY attitude that the Greens embrace, which says, 'Let's tweak tax codes but vote for no new housing.' This government chooses construction over contention and delivery over delay. We are absolutely focused on solving this housing crisis, and we are focused on building more homes, not more hashtags. That's why this urgency motion misses the mark and why Labor will be focused on building the homes Australia actually needs.

Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When we're talking about housing, it's not just a social issue that we bang on about but a macroeconomic one. This isn't about pointing fingers at who's to blame, who was in government the longest or who created the mess; it's about what we're going to do about this mess that we find ourselves in. When we have figures showing that social housing makes up just 3.6 per cent of dwellings, which is down from nearly six per cent back in the 1980s, that's concerning, and it highlights policy failure of the government of the day.

We've heard from Senator Dowling about the importance of increasing supply, but there are other things we can address that will save a lot within the budget and also ensure that, for Australian families and young Australians who are doing it tough, the Australian dream of homeownership is not lost. They include addressing negative gearing and capital gains tax discount and making sure we are not giving property investors the tax breaks that they don't really deserve. Let's face it, seven per cent of investors own a quarter of all investment properties. I wouldn't be surprised if they were most of the 48 billionaires around the country who are hoarding the assets and who are trying to influence the politics of the day, who have politicians in this place who do their bidding for them. So it is about getting to the crux of the issue, and that is listening to the Australian people and easing cost-of-living pressures by making housing affordable. That means addressing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, which, research shows, would save the budget about $160 billion. That's a lot of money that could go into building houses.

Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I always welcome Senator McKim's urgency motions on housing, because I agree with him that housing is an urgent issue for all Australians. Arguably it's one of the most urgent issues facing future generations of Australians. That is why I'm sure Senator McKim must be so relieved to have a responsible Labor government in office instead of the chaos of the former coalition, who spent a decade destroying housing affordability in this country. The Liberals created the crisis through a decade of inaction. And, at every turn, over the past three years the Greens have played their political games with the conservatives in the hope of picking up an extra few votes.

We all know how that turned out. It's why the Australian people showed the Liberals' housing spokesperson, Michael Sukkar, the door at the last election, along with the Greens housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather. So imagine my surprise, seeing Michael Sukkar's name pop up in the media last week, at the not-so-secret meeting in a nice house and suburb of Melbourne. Nothing says 'modern Liberal Party' like a bunch of blokes disappearing into a house to decide a woman's fate. I'll tell you what they weren't talking about: they weren't talking about housing policy or how to get more Australians into a house of their own. They were talking about their own corner offices; that's what they were talking about.

Compare that approach to Labor's: a $45 billion Homes for Australia plan to deliver 55,000 social and affordable homes, as well as initiatives to make it easier to buy and better to rent and to build more homes. In this term of government we will build more that one million new homes in the next five years. Plans are underway to construct 55,000 social and affordable homes, an area of critical need. Recently I was pleased to visit a construction site in the CBD of Toowoomba. It's a partnership project between the council, the state and the federal government to deliver 75 units in the CBD. We're also training more tradies at TAFE to get more Aussie workers out on the tools, with $10,000 incentive payments to help them with their study in a trade. We're making it easier to buy a home, with our five per cent deposit guarantee for every first-home buyer in the country. And there'll be more to come.

I'm especially proud to say that, since coming to office, the Albanese government has supported over 220,000 people to buy a home with a five per cent deposit. I'll say that again: 220,000 Australians are in a home thanks to the Albanese government, thanks to our five per cent deposit initiative—which you all tried to destroy. In my home state of Queensland, Labor's five per cent home deposits are making a huge difference to families. I'm proud to say that more than 50,000 Queenslanders are in a home of their own thanks to Labor's five per cent home deposit scheme. That's 50,000 Queenslanders who would still be renting if the Greens and the Liberal Party had their way. That's 50,000 Queenslanders who would still be struggling to save a 20 per cent deposit if the Liberals and the Nationals had remained in power. Fifty thousand Queenslanders who they would prefer to see paying $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 in lenders mortgage insurance have saved that money thanks to Labor.

On this side of the chamber, when there's a job to be done, we roll up our sleeves. We know that there is more work to do, because hardworking Australians across this country, despite doing everything in their power to save for a house, are still struggling to buy their own home. But they are also being demonised for getting a home loan. People in this chamber forget that ordinary people need to go and see a bank, lender or broker to get a loan to buy a home. There are people in this chamber that whinge about people going to the bank to buy a home, but what is the alternative? I don't know anyone who could pay cash for a home, certainly not on this side of the chamber, but I reckon there are a few people on that side of the chamber who do.

The ones who are applying to the bank, ordinary Australians, ordinary Queenslanders, to get a loan don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on lenders mortgage insurance, which is basically a tax on working families. They are the ones out there doing the real work and earning the real money. In the face of global uncertainty and a difficult economy, Labor knows people need hope, opportunity and help to get into their first home. That's exactly what our five per cent deposits do.

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a dark day. Just hours ago, the Reserve Bank raised interest rates to 3.85 per cent. This is one of the shortest and shallowest rate-cutting cycles in three decades. What this actually means is that millions of Australians will bear the brunt of this interest rate rise because the government has not tackled two major causes of inflation: spiralling health costs and corporate profiteering. If you are a mortgage holder or renter, you're being hit by the RBA to fix the government's inflation problem. The government's priorities mean that everyday Australians are copping the pain, while banks, energy companies and property investors keep winning. People are rightly worried about their economic security, their wages and their futures. They are hurting.

We know that housing is a huge contributor to our inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. According to the ABS, housing was the largest contributor to annual inflation over the past 12 months, with a 5.5 per cent rise. Politics is all about choices. Just the other day, new data from ACOSS showed that the federal government spends more on tax breaks for wealthy property investors than it does on social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined. That's a choice, a choice against the issues that are facing so many Australians in housing stress. This is $12.3 billion of foregone revenue towards the deeply unfair capital gains tax discount and negative gearing tax break while social housing waiting lists exceed 10 years in every major city.

Social housing makes up less than two per cent of dwellings today. That's down from 22 per cent of all housing built annually in the 1950s. We know things can be different. We are at a record low in social housing stock, which only makes persistent homelessness worse. Come to my city of Adelaide and you can see it on our streets and parklands every day and every night. There are nine preventable deaths every single day of people who have experienced homelessness. This is a national shame in our wealthy country.

It's clear that Labor cares more about investors with dozens of properties than it does about renters, first home buyers and people experiencing homelessness. Labor needs to stop making things worse. The solutions are clear. Our history shows us we can do this well and we can do it differently. We need to make corporate price gouging illegal. We need to end the tax breaks that help wealthy investors to hoard housing. This government must urgently slow housing inflation. Labor needs to stop treating housing like a game of Monopoly. It needs to scrap the tax breaks for wealthy property investors and to directly build public and affordable housing. Labor should be protecting households, not corporate profits.

Treasurer Chalmers recently said the government is open to tax reform to address intergenerational unfairness driven by this nation's dysfunctional property market. Well, it's time you did something about it, Treasurer. Even Mathias Cormann, who is now leading the OECD, has said that this government should be 'removing some of the favourable tax treatment of residential property ownership, including capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing'. In his words, this 'would help to cool demand and could help to mitigate upward pressure on house prices.'

There's growing pressure on the government to act. It's time to get on with it. There are solutions there. Let's implement them. Let's relieve some of the pressure that so many Australian families are facing, rather than making the problems worse with things like the five per cent deposit scheme, which just add heat and fuel rising house prices.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Interest rates, as we all know, are up. I want to say to people, very clearly, don't blame the RBA for putting interest rates up. Blame Labor and the government for creating the circumstances that left the RBA with nowhere else to go other than to put interest rates up. We know that if you're a mortgage holder, more of your money is now going into the profits of the big banks. We know that if you're renting, you know exactly what comes next, because higher interest rates flow straight into higher rents. We've seen this story before. It shouldn't be ordinary Australians carrying the pain because Labor has refused to take on the corporate price gougers right across the economy and because Labor's policies have turbocharged the housing crisis.

The governor of the Reserve Bank singled out credit growth as one of the things that the RBA was extremely concerned about. We know that, since Labor put in place their five per cent deposit scheme, credit growth for housing speculators has gone through the roof—it's growing at record rates—whereas credit growth for owner-occupiers—people who want to borrow to fund the purchase of their own home—is absolutely flat. It is stagnant.

Labor has turbocharged housing demand and that demand is being driven by property speculators, who are flooding back into the market. They're supported by the mindbogglingly massive taxpayer subsidies that Labor offers them, in particular in the form of the capital gains tax discount—the most unfair tax break on the books in this country. Sums in the tens of billions of dollars a year are handed over by the Labor Party to help people who are buying their 50th, their 100th or their 500th investment property to outbid renters who are trying to buy their first home.

Massive property speculator tax breaks are turbocharging housing prices. Labor's culpability is clear. On corporate price gouging, Labor's culpability is just as clear. Right across the economy—whether it's the banks, whether it's airlines, whether it's insurance companies—we are seeing corporate price gouging making bank off ordinary Australians, because this Labor government is refusing to act.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How do you claim to tackle the housing and cost-of-living crises while handing out $360 billion for imaginary subs? How do you say you're easing pressure on families, when one in three big corporations pay less tax than a nurse, without upsetting billionaire donors? It's tricky. How do you choose between helping a single parent who can't afford rent or giving yet another tax break to her landlord? How do you tell Gina Rinehart or Anthony Pratt that they might need to pay more tax because nurses and teachers can't put food on the table after paying theirs?

Apparently, the answer is simple. Billionaires make massive political donations. Nurses and teachers don't. Inflation isn't driven by a nurse's pay rise; it's driven by corporate greed. The major parties would rather see your mortgage explode than rein in the property moguls in this country. They would rather protect fossil fuel donors than cut your energy bills. It is the same hypocrisy and the same excuses. We must end property investor tax breaks and curb the power of billionaires and corporations, and we must put housing and households first. It seems pretty bloody simple. Families don't need excuses; they need relief. All we need is some courage and some leadership from this government.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know there are some in this place who are busy telling people the housing crisis is caused by migration. They tell people this easy lie and the supposedly easy solution. We expect to hear that racist sentiment from One Nation and the Liberals, but we can't forget Labor's role in enabling it. On 4 November last year Senator Bell, from One Nation, asked a question which attempted to blame the housing crisis on migration. He asked the government when serious removals would begin. Instead of condemning or even disputing One Nation's racist dog whistle, Minister Watt from Labor said he had already outlined some of the steps this government has taken to reduce net overseas migration. When someone asks if you are going to kick out migrants who are taking all our houses, you don't accept the premise; you fight it—unless, like Labor, you have no other solutions and you're willing to join the dog whistle.

Research by the Australia Institute shows that the number of dwellings is growing faster than the population. The real problem here is clear: it's tax breaks, capital gains rorts and negative gearing—not migrants—that are driving up house prices. How do we know? During the COVID lockdown, when net migration was negative, house prices went up by 20 per cent in just 18 months. It's time to get real. Bring a plan into this place that isn't handouts for developers or investors, that doesn't rely on putting people in horrifically large mortgages and that doesn't blame migrants for the greed of bankers and their political mates in this place. (Time expired)

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the Greens' urgency motion be agreed to.