Matters of Urgency — Housing

Karen Grogan

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

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

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

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

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.

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