Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Women) | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians deserve the answer to a simple question: why is the government using our money to help foreign investment funds buy up the homes that they will never be able to own themselves? That's what's actually happening. The investors this policy is built to attract are foreign pension funds, funds whose job it is to pay comfortable retirements to people who are on the other side of the world. They put their money into Australian build-to-rent because it earns them a steady, generous return, and that return comes from one place: the rent paid every month by Australian families who have given up the hope of ever owning their own home. Think about what we are really building here: a retiree in another country, living on an income paid for by the rent cheque of an Australian.

We don't have to guess at the intent. The government says the purpose of this measure is to attract more foreign investment into Australia and for cheaper rentals. But here's how it actually works: when one of those foreign funds makes a profit renting to Australians and sends that profit overseas, it normally pays tax on the way out, but the Albanese Labor government has cut that tax in half. The fund keeps twice as much of what it makes from Australian renters. Remember what we were promised this budget was about—equity and fairness. The Treasurer stood in the other chamber and called the housing system unfair and unacceptable. What did Labor's version of fairness actually turn out to mean? It meant a higher tax bill for the mum-and-dad investor, with one investment property locked in with the help of the Australian Greens.

If the government won't listen to everyday Australians, perhaps it will listen to the rest of the world. Overnight, the United States Senate passed the most significant housing affordability law that country has seen in a generation by 85 votes to five. It was written and carried by Republicans and Democrats together—two parties that agree on almost nothing. One of the few things that they could agree on was the need to stop large, institutional investors from crowding families out of the housing market. The lesson the world's biggest economy has drawn from both sides of politics is that if you put guardrails around institutional money in housing, it causes harm.

This government is doing the exact opposite: it is paying that money to come in. They are giving subsidies to those investors, in a sense, and the damage is already showing up. In New South Wales, a build-to-rent apartment tower is charged council rates as though it were one single dwelling—one bill for the entire building, even though hundreds of families reside inside it. The City of Ryde modelled the financial impacts on a build-to-rent block of 695 apartments. Rated as is, the whole building—the foreign pension fund—pays around $92,000 a year. If you divide that across 695 homes, it roughly equates to $130 an apartment that this overseas pension fund pays, yet Australians who own their own unit up the road pay a minimum of $695. Isn't that interesting? The corporate landlord contributes about a fifth of what an Australian family pays for the same roads, the same paths and the same libraries, and the $500,000 that goes missing each year on this one building is made up for by Australians paying their rates. That doesn't sound right, does it? That is what careless government looks like. This government rolled out a tax break to lure these funds into building, and never once asked what the model would do to the communities left to live with it. It wrote the check and handed somebody else the bill, and we know exactly who that someone is. Labor has chosen to tax the family with one flat and reward the fund with a thousand. You should be ashamed. That's not fairness, and the government needs to explain why they have settled for that.