Source: Prime Minister of Australia
ALICIA PAYNE, MEMBER FOR CANBERRA: Good morning, everyone. I’m Alicia Payne, the Member for Canberra, and I’m thrilled this morning to be here with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, and Housing Minister Clare O’Neil to talk about what we are doing to help more Australians into housing. We’ve just visited the home of my constituents, Mika and Matt, and I really thank them for hosting us this morning. They’re another young couple who have benefited from our five per cent deposit scheme, and it was really heartwarming to see how them and their gorgeous dog, Pikelet, are settling into their new home. Our government is making sure that Australians can get into stable housing, whether it’s achieving the dream of owning their own home, or young homeless people getting into social housing. Our Budget has really invested in that. We’re also levelling the playing field so that incentive is skewed towards investing in new homes, and young people can get that start they need in the housing market. It’s my great pleasure now to hand over to the Prime Minister.
< ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER
Now, Tuesday night’s Budget was an opportunity as well for us to further advance our housing agenda. We have our $47 billion Homes for Australia Plan. That includes the $2 billion of additional funding for that little bit of extra infrastructure that you need for homes to go from the planning stage into construction. It might be sewerage, water, electricity, a little road infrastructure that will make a difference as well. But quite clearly, all of the measures that we’ve put in place for supply haven’t been enough. We need to do more. We need to throw everything at this. And that’s why we’re changing negative gearing so that when someone wants to invest in their own future wealth and a future asset for themselves, if they invest in a new home rather than an existing home, where they’re competing at an auction with first home buyers, and they have an advantage over people who are trying to buy a home for themselves and have that roof over their head. If they invest in a new home, what they’re doing as well is not just investing in their own future wealth and assets, they’re investing in the nation, because they’re assisting in supply. Because people will be skewed who are investors towards the new housing market rather than competing in the existing housing market with first home buyers. This is a really practical change. It’s a practical change which will change people’s lives and make an enormous difference.
And the fact that the Coalition, who I didn’t know that Angus Taylor had employed Malcolm Roberts as a speechwriter, but last night that’s what it looked like. And then you couldn’t have any answers about costings or anything else. They’ve just been a mess and haven’t been able to hold the line this morning. And the Treasurer will say more about the chaos that is the three ring circus of the Coalition, the Liberals, the Nationals and One Nation all competing against each other, drifting Australia further and further down the hard right agenda. But our Minister for Housing, Clare O’Neil, who I’ll spend a bit of time with over the next week, she has done an amazing job and is very focused. Unlike the former government, who for most of the time they were in office, couldn’t actually have one of their many Prime Ministers turn to a Housing Minister, because they didn’t have one. They didn’t have a Minister, they didn’t have an agenda. All they had was the housing pressures build up and up and up. Well, we’ve taken hard decisions this week to make sure that we continue to deliver more and more for the benefit of particularly young Australians, but also by the grandfathering that’s there, make sure that we also look after people who’ve made those investments under the negative gearing scheme.
< CLARE O’NEIL, MINISTER FOR HOUSING
Even before the Budget on Tuesday, we had the most ambitious Australian government agenda on housing for 70 years. We’re building more homes, we’re getting renters a better deal and we’re getting more Australians into home ownership. Now, on Tuesday night, we built significantly on that agenda, and the Budget for housing was about two really important things. It’s about levelling the playing field for our nation’s first home buyers and it’s about building more homes for the country. Now, we’ve seen already the Liberals come out and say that they are going to unwind this, they’re going to unwind the five per cent deposit program, they’re going to unwind the tax changes that are going to level the playing field. And this tells us everything about where the Liberals are. They are literally the only people in this country who can’t see that we’ve got a cooked housing market. And while they’re defending the status quo, our government is standing up and fighting for the people of this nation who deserve better housing opportunities. And we’ll continue to do that. And I’d say to the people of this country, we’ve got a big fight on our hands here against an assortment of right wing parties who want to defend the status quo, point the finger at migrants and say, ‘this is everyone else’s fault’. We are going to stand up, we are going to fight for you and we are going to make the housing situation for our country better.
< JIM CHALMERS, TREASURER
Housing is really the defining intergenerational challenge in our economy and in our society, and our Budget does something about it. There’s no point having a ladder if the first few rungs are missing. And what we’re trying to do with this Budget, in addition to all of our work on supply and five per cent deposits, is to make the tax system and the housing market fairer for all Australians, but particularly for younger Australians who’ve been locked out for too long. That’s the motivation behind this Budget. Now, we could have taken a politically easier path and left everything exactly as it is, but that would have made life harder for tens of thousands of Australians, and particularly younger Australians who are getting a raw deal at the intersection of the housing market and the tax system. So, we took the difficult decision to change our policy on negative gearing and Capital Gains to give people a fairer deal, particularly younger people in a housing market and in a tax system which isn’t working for them. That’s really one of the key elements of the Budget that we handed down on Tuesday night.
Now, ours is a plan to strengthen the economy. Angus Taylor’s is a ploy to stave off One Nation. What we saw last night from Angus Taylor was not a Budget Reply, it was a binfire. It wasn’t a Budget Reply, it was a bin fire of higher deficits, more debt, more inflation and more division. Angus Taylor’s recipe is for higher inflation, bigger deficits, more debt and more division in our society. Now, he was asked last night, immediately after giving this speech, how much would his tax plan cost and he couldn’t say. Now, he won’t tell you what he needs to cut to pay for his policies, because he can’t tell you how much it costs. Now, I have seen a lot of Budget replies in my time. The PM has seen a few as well. But I’ve never seen one that has died within half an hour of delivery. But that’s what happened last night. In the very first interview that Angus Taylor gave about his Budget in Reply speech, he couldn’t tell the Australian people how much his plan cost. And that means he can’t tell you how much and how he’ll cut to pay for those tax policies. He can’t tell you what it means for Medicare. We know when the Liberals and Nationals won’t tell you where the cuts are coming from, we know that they’re going after Medicare again to pay for this uncosted, unfunded shambles of a Budget Reply that we saw last night. So, we work through these very serious issues in our economy in a considered and in a methodical way. What Angus Taylor released last night was uncosted. It was unfunded. It was a recipe for much bigger deficits, much more debt and much more division as well. Angus Taylor is focused exclusively on staving off One Nation. This government is focused on strengthening our economy, making it work for more people, and housing is a really important part of that.
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