That's a hard speech to follow—a very powerful speech from our new senator. It was a very moving speech, too, to welcome her and hear more about her.

I return now to the business of Senator Bragg's proposal, which draws our attention to the government's failure on housing, including in the budget, and his critique of where we're at in a housing crisis. The motion says that the government has failed on housing. Certainly they've failed on affordability. At present we are in the worst affordability crisis in this country in living memory. They have failed us on setting a target for building new homes. We are so far off their target that it is drifting off into the future—hundreds of thousands of houses short of the target that we know they aimed to reach. Most importantly, they have failed the third of Australians who are renters, many of them renting for way longer than they expected because of the doubling of the time it now takes to save a deposit for a home.

There was nothing in the last budget or in Labor's election platform for renters, and this is now a pervasive and extended experience for so many people, certainly for young people but also for many people who did not expect to be renting for decades of their life and in many cases became lifetime renters. People across our country are being hit with massive rent increases—a 23 per cent increase in the last five years, a period that has seen a fall in real wages every year, a fall of five per cent in real wages, facing that 23 per cent increase in rents. It is an impossible squeeze for so many parents, for so many families, for so many young people.

People are hurting across the country, and renters are being pushed to the wall. Today I have had in my office Anglicare from Western Australia as well as the Western Australian Council of Social Service. These are services that, every day, provide support and assistance to people who are homeless, who are in dire rental stress. These two services brought with them the story that in Western Australia, in central Perth, at the moment there are 69 young homeless people for every vacant bed for a homeless person.

This is in a rich country. This country is at the top of the OECD in terms of wealth. And here we have one bed for 69 young homeless people in the centre of Perth. Shame on us and shame on the decades of policy failure by both sides of this parliament, both major parties, in failing to deal with a crisis—to build the public housing, to have the rental policies we need and to make sure every Australian has a roof over their head.

The primary funding vehicle that's come forward from the Labor government in recent years has been the Housing Australia Future Fund—the HAFF. It was never going to meet the demand of the 640,000 Australians who are in dire housing stress right now. It will build 40,000 homes. That does not touch the sides of those hundreds of thousands of people looking for housing. And just in the last week the United Nations has slammed us as a country for the demolition of 44 public housing towers in Melbourne, saying it is likely to amplify Victoria's housing crisis and could be in violation of the international human right to housing.

The Victorian Labor government has a plan—unbelievable in this housing crisis—to abolish 44 public housing towers. I've visited those towers. I've sat with people, talking about their experience, their community, and the importance of their being able to stay with the people they have formed friendships with, have raised their families with, have built their after-school programs with and are established in their employment around. Those houses are going. Those lives are disrupted. We are in the midst of a housing crisis that will change a whole generation of people in whole suburbs in a big city like Melbourne. It is a crisis and a response that is simply unbelievable. The same thing is happening in the middle of Sydney.

This motion from Senator Bragg only acknowledges Labor's contribution to this incredible housing crisis. But we must face the fact that both major parties have been very significant contributors to the crisis. And we must find a way forward to help those renters, to cap that rent, to build the public housing we need and to make housing affordable again. (Time expired)

Mr Acting Deputy President, $34.1 billion wiped out in a single quarter—that is what the loss in the value of Australia's housing stock amounts to in just the last quarter. What we're witnessing across Australia is an absolute crisis in the housing market. It's a failure on housing that isn't an accident in the market; it's a design feature of this government's budget. This budget, their budget, delivered tax hikes that have smashed confidence, have driven away investment, will result in fewer homes being built—by design—and are going to have ripple effects all across the economy. Just this week, ABS stats out confirmed that $34.1 billion was wiped off the total value of the Australian residential property market in the June quarter alone. That's the first drop in the net national housing stock value since late 2022.

But major forecasters HSBC, the Commonwealth Bank and AMP are saying that this is just the start. They are expecting peak-to-trough falls of somewhere between nine and 13 per cent. In Sydney, house values have already dropped by seven per cent. In Melbourne, thousands of homes are losing value week on week, and over 90 per cent of capital-city suburbs are now in outright price decline.

Housing crises like this do not happen in a vacuum. The primary catalyst—indeed, the predominant catalyst—for this freeze was the government's May budget. It was a budget that delivered a body blow to property investment by changing the tax rules in the middle of the game. By targeting negative gearing on established dwellings and by unwinding longstanding capital gains tax arrangements, the Labor government told thousands of everyday Australians—investors, superannuants and mum-and-dad property owners—that their capital was no longer safe in Australian real estate.

The government assured us that there was nothing to worry about. In the Treasury budget papers, the government explicitly claimed that these tax interventions would lead to nothing more than 'a small and temporary slowing in housing price growth'. Well, does the Labor government still stand by this prediction? Do they think $34 billion wiped out in a single quarter is 'a small and temporary slowing in housing price growth'? Do they think a fall in house values of somewhere between nine and 13 per cent, from peak to trough, is 'a small and temporary slowing in housing price growth'?

The reality is that the assumptions behind Labor's assault on housing in this budget have completely collapsed, because this budget has smashed investor confidence. What that has done is choke off the very capital that is required to build new housing. Developers cannot secure presales because private investor demand has evaporated. Institutional builders are pulling back projects because the regulatory and tax environments are unpredictable and volatile. When you scare away private investment, you don't create more housing; you create less housing. In the middle of an acute national housing shortage, this government has engineered a policy framework that ensures that fewer slabs are poured, fewer frames are erected and fewer keys are handed over to new owners.

And the damage doesn't stop there. Construction is one of the largest private-sector employers in this country, and so, when home building stalls, subcontractors lose work and apprentices are let go. Small businesses right across the supply chain feel that squeeze.

The housing collapse is also having a devastating impact on consumer confidence because, for the vast majority of Australian households, their home is their primary asset. And, when families see literally tens of thousands of dollars stripped from their home's value overnight, they tighten their belts. It's the obvious thing to do. You see that retail sales drop, hospitality suffers and broader domestic demand contracts. The wealth effect works both ways, and this government is presiding over a reverse wealth effect that threatens to drag our wider economy into stagnation.

You cannot tax your way into housing affordability. You cannot bludgeon the housing sector with tax changes and then wonder why new supply is not coming online. You cannot punish investors and then expect builders to keep building. This housing failure was designed on the treasury bench. I call on the government to admit that its budget tax hikes have failed and are destroying confidence in the Australian housing market and to reverse course before it is too late.

Senator Bragg's proposition today asks us to believe that Australia's housing crisis somehow began with the last Labor budget. The numbers tell a very different story. Since 1999, Australian house prices have risen by more than 400 per cent. I hear those opposite stressing about a few per centage points. There was a 400 per cent increase; that's the context we're working in. That increase was more than twice as fast as the growth of average full-time earnings. You've had a 400 per cent growth in house prices, and full-time wages have only grown by half that. Median house prices are now eight times average full-time earnings, and it takes an average of 11.2 years to save a standard deposit for a house.

This crisis was decades in the making. Suddenly, we see some affordability coming into the market and those opposite think that's the time to call a crisis. The crisis was decades in the making and now we're doing something about it. No serious person should pretend one government created these challenges in our housing market, but, equally, nobody should pretend it suddenly appeared in May. For the coalition's first six years in government, they didn't even have a federal housing minister.

When the coalition eventually decided it had an answer to declining homeownership, one of its signature ideas was to let young Australians raid their superannuation to buy a home. Senator Bragg has been one of the idea's strongest advocates. At the National Press Club just last month he reminded us the coalition took super for housing policies to the last two elections, and only weeks ago he confirmed that the relationship between super and housing was again part of a policy review. Let's just think about the economics of that for a moment. If you have too few homes and you give every prospective buyer more money to bid for them, you haven't created another home. In a supply constrained market, some of that additional purchasing power simply gets capitalised into higher prices. The buyer arrives at the auction with more money and so does everyone else, and they arrive with less superannuation at the same time. Housing affordability ultimately requires more housing and that means land, planning, tradies, finance, as well as the roads, water, power and sewerage that turn developable land into actual homes.

Here's where today's motion becomes particularly interesting. Less than two weeks ago, Senator Bragg said, 'A housing target is meaningless if the connecting roads are not built, the sewer is not hooked up and the water does not reach the block.' On that point, Senator Bragg is right. Senator Bragg, welcome to Labor's housing policy, because the budget he is attacking includes specifically another $2 billion for exactly that enabling infrastructure, taking our investment to $6.3 billion and supporting up to 65,000 additional homes. In Tasmania, you can see what that means. At South Brighton, just outside of Hobart, more than $10 million in Commonwealth funding is delivering sewerage, roads and connections needed to unlock up to 600 homes. Our agreement with Tasmania will unlock 4,000 more homes with up to 2,100 reserved exclusively for first homebuyers, At Dowsing Point, surplus Commonwealth land has the potential to deliver another thousand homes for greater Hobart. That is supply policy. That is why the design of our tax reforms matter.

We are not removing negative gearing from new housing; we are preserving it for new builds. Existing investments are grandfathered and new housing receives preferential treatment under the capital gains tax reforms as well. The economic signal here is straightforward: if taxpayers are going to subsidise property investment, let's give investors a reason to add another home to the market. You can argue about the calibration of that policy, but to claim it is designed to produce fewer homes ignores how the policy actually works. And the latest evidence actually supports the claim. If we look at the ABS figures, they show that dwelling approvals are in fact nine per cent higher than a year ago, and the underlying trend is up almost 12 per cent. In Tasmania, approvals rose 15 per cent in July alone. Does that mean the housing crisis is solved? Of course not. We need more supply, faster approvals, greater construction productivity and more skilled workers. That is precisely why this government is funding infrastructure, releasing land, training tradies, cutting red tape, building social and affordable housing, and reforming tax incentives. Australia needs more homes. On that much, Senator Bragg and I agree. The difference is that we're getting on with actually building them.

I love it when people come in here and they have carefully manicured notes off their talking points and the secure website, what they should say on these issues such as housing. But there's always one little thing that comes along—that is, reality. The reality is that the Labor Party can't get here and say that this isn't by design, because Budget Paper No. 1, page 158, says that they expect the taxation changes will create 35,000 fewer homes. It's in the budget papers. All the talking points in the world about how this isn't causing a problem don't matter, because the budget papers you relied on for these changes give the game away.

It's more than that. These are the budget papers that said rents would go up $2 per week based on these changes, when we've already seen $100 per week changes—and we heard Senator Pocock talk about one-third of people renting. You're ignoring the facts of what's actually happening on the basis of talking points, and that's not what Australia needs right now.

When you go through this and see the fall of confidence in the market, we see prices stagnating. We see prices falling in capital cities. We see billions and billions of dollars of earned wealth disappearing from people who already own their home, who've done their work, who've paid their taxes, who've paid their mortgages. You've reduced confidence in the market.

What you're forgetting is, in the market, almost half of all dwellings are built by developers for profit. In the fresh home market, the vast majority—about 75 to 80 per cent—are built by owner-occupiers: 'I want to build a home. I'm going to pay for it.' But when you get to apartments, when you get to townhouses, when you get to other things, the vast majority are built by developers. They're looking at the increased costs of different things and they're looking at the bullying in the industry around the CFMEU, and they're saying the risk isn't worth it anymore. So, for the last four years, half of the 170,000 to 210,000 dwellings that are built every year in this country now have a big question mark—are they going to be built in the future?—because they don't stack up.

People I've been talking to say they look at their costings and they do their budgets and they know what's going on today, and they figure the costs they're exposed to over time by changes in structures and changes in the CFMEU will be compensated by the price rises of their property over the same time. They do their budgets now for what will happen, but now they know there is no increase in value from the moment they hit FID, final investment decision, to the time they construct it. So now they're saying, 'I won't build it; I won't take the risk.'

Imagine, when we are already bringing more people into the country than the homes we're building, taking another half of that market and not building it anymore. Say we dropped to 100,000 homes a year. What happens then? There is a greater push on services and a greater push against migration—the migration we need in some instances—because we're not building enough homes. It is all because we have crashed confidence in the housing market by design, not accidentally. It's black and white on the pages.

We say we're going to build fewer homes. We say that knocking down the value of people's existing dwellings is a good thing, but it is not; it will cause problems tomorrow. Holding values might be one thing—we don't need to go up by the rates we've gone up historically—but dropping values is a bad thing. When we hear the NAB saying there's been a 14.5 per cent drop and when we hear CommBank saying there's been a 16 per cent drop, when we see these numbers—that has real value; that is trillions of dollars of value across the Australian economy.

Earlier today we heard an anecdote about a businessperson with property who's getting a margin call because they think the LVR, the lending-to-valuation ratio, has dropped to a point where they have to come up with a significant amount of money to cover that gap. That is the reality of the confidence we are doing in the property market, and it is not good enough. It will cause secondary problems. When we are building fewer homes, it will judge out in the market itself: prices will eventually go up in two or three years, when these things aren't coming online. But, in the meantime we'll have more social problems.

The only way to have an efficient housing system and fix this housing problem is to facilitate construction, whether it be private homes or public homes. The settings are wrong right across this—from council planning laws to everyone in the world who thinks they've got an idea about what should go in the house, as well as the regulation and the building industry codes, which change every day. It needs to be a simple, confident market where people know what they can build, know they can make money and develop the 170,000 to 210,000 homes we rely on every year.

That concludes the debate on the matter of public importance.