Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026

Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (20:00): I love this country. I love what it means to be Australian. I love what it meant to me, when I was playing overseas, to hear the anthem and see the flag.

I love driving up to this place in the morning, seeing Parliament House—the flag twice as large as a double-decker bus. I love coming into this place because of the opportunities that it provides and the opportunities that it affords us. In this place I sit next to a boilermaker who also happens to be a five-time Olympian.

That's crazy. I see around me people from all different walks of life: social workers, sparkies, doctors, lawyers, teachers. My parents were teachers.

In 1981, just before I turned two, they bought their first house—they built their first house. My sister came home to that house. My first pet, a rabbit creatively named Rabbit, also came to that house, allegedly because my parents were too poor to afford birthday presents that year.

But they built him a hutch. It wasn't very good, and Rabbit promptly ran away. Rabbit was replaced by other pets: Boy George, the border collie-Scotch collie cross; Sally, the labrador; Icky the cat; Deefa the cat; and Riva the cat.

Memories were created in that house. Like I said, my sister came home there. The place where I fell through the roof and then blamed it on the cat remains unfixed.

The thump of the basketballs that I used to play with as a child reverberate through that home. They are still there. My posters are still on the wall—Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Dennis Rodman.

Stickers populate the door. They should probably paint that; they have not. And now, because my parents are still in their own home, more memories have been created: my daughters squealing when the timed sprinklers went on and surprised them when they were three and five years old; my nephews going there as babies—hearing that newborn baby cry in the house; Christmases, with the smell of the pine tree cut down from out the front.

Those memories belong in that house and they belong to those people, because memories are more than just a single point in time. They grow and are added to, and they imbue the area in which they were made. That is not a house, to paraphrase The Castle; it's a home.

It's my parents' home and it's been their home for 46 years, and everything that comes with it belongs to them. I didn't have that opportunity. I rented a lot.

I moved around a lot. The formative memories of my children playing monsters in the backyard—that backyard belongs to someone else. Making a fort in a living room to watch TV at night—that living room belongs to someone else.

My daughters falling asleep on my lap because it's past their bedtime but I've let them watch Finding Nemo one more time—that different living room again belongs to someone else. I have those memories, but they are not refreshed every day, like my mother's memory is refreshed every day when she walks past my room and when she walks past the old toy box. That is something that I don't have, and it is something that I hope my children get to have.

Should my daughters choose to have children, I want them to come home to their house, to grow up in their house, with their backyard, and that the little funerals that you have for pets as a child are able to be remembered, that all of those little things that go into the woodwork and seep into the carpet, and the smells, the sounds and the creaks all remind them every day of the life they have built in their home.

That's what this is all about: levelling the playing field, giving people the opportunity to develop that life that my parents have loved and enjoyed, the one that I slightly missed out on, the one that I want my daughters to have. That's why this is so important: 75,000 houses. And we're seeing that investment right now: $140 million for trunk infrastructure just south of Cairns, where 13,000 homes will one day be built, where Christmases will happen, where grandparents will meet their grandchildren for the first time.

The best and the worst of life will happen there, but you'll have that sanctum, that protection, that part of Australia that makes it yours—your own home. The status quo was no longer working. That should not be a debate.

That is a fact. We know it to be a fact because we keep hearing about first home buyers, young people priced out of the market, giving up hope, believing that they are never, ever going to achieve the great Australian dream, that they're not going to have the Hills hoist in the backyard, that they're not going to be able to play cricket with the kids, because it's going to be somebody else's.

Don't you want to give that back? Don't you want to give young Australians that opportunity? Don't you want to present them with that pride that they'll get from having their own home?

It takes courage to make changes. This government is showing that courage—the courage to reach our hands out and say: 'We hear you. We understand.

And the playing field will be levelled.' We want people to build homes. We want people to invest in property, but to make that a new property, to add to the supply. You can negatively gear.

You can use the same CGT. You just have to build a new home. As I said, there are about to be 13,000 of them, just south of Cairns, 5,000 reserved for first home buyers and 8.000 for investors, if you want them.

This is going to mean that Australia is given back to everybody, that everyone gets that chance, everyone gets that opportunity, because it's really only opportunity that we are fighting for. What you do with that opportunity is up to you, but you need to be able to reach it, and for too long it was slipping out of grasp, further and further away. Prior to these changes, it could take up to 20 years to save for a deposit.

If you start seriously saving for a deposit at 25 and nothing goes wrong, you'll be fractionally younger than I am now when you get your first home deposit. That's crazy. My parents had paid off their house by the time I was 15—it's a great house—and then they got to get on with the rest of their lives.

They could salary sacrifice to ensure that their super was large enough that they could enjoy retirement. They're not going to be paying off a house until they're 65 or 70 years old. They got to live the best versions of themselves, and they got to do that because they were able to buy a house when they were young and it was affordable.

This government wants that for everybody. But there's more than that. We're reducing the tax burden for more than 13 million workers.

That's five tax cuts that this Anthony Albanese Labor government has put in—five, not just a slightly-above-mediocre boy band from the early 2000s but a ringing endorsement of the faith we have in Australian workers that they deserve to keep more of what they earn in their pocket to be what they want to be, to spend how they want to spend. And they want to spend on housing.

That is overwhelmingly what we're told, every single day, at every doorknock, at every phone bank, in every community office. And I know I'm not speaking just for myself but for right across the country: 'You've got to do something about the housing. I'm concerned about my children.

I'm concerned about my grandchildren. It doesn't seem fair. How are they ever going to get their foot in the door?' We are creating those spaces.

We are creating that opportunity. There is no greater purpose of a government than to create opportunity for the next generation. It is our absolute responsibility in this place to find a way to get that hope back, because hope drives aspiration, aspiration drives wealth and all of that is interconnected, intertwined.

We've snatched away, over successive governments, over many decades, that spark of hope—that part that says, 'This is mine.' Ownership is important. Place is important. Sense of belonging is important.

And that can occur through homeownership. People will have children. People will create memories.

It is everything that the Australian dream suggests. This is not an easy change. We acknowledge that, but it had to be done.

The time had expired on locking out the younger generation. Jokes about avocado and toast do not cut it. The only thing that makes a difference is presenting that chance.

Five per cent deposits are a huge part of that. The raft of cost-of-living measures that have been rolled out and opposed by those opposite make a difference. You chip away at the boulder to make it more liftable, to make it more achievable.

This is something that I will remember being a part of. This is the day that this House and this government get a chance to let young people back into the game, give them the hope that we had and give them the opportunity that we've enjoyed to hopefully have a rabbit hutch that the rabbit cannot run away from. These make a difference.

We make a difference. By opposing these measures, you oppose the tax cuts. By opposing these measures, you oppose opportunity.

It means that we're not listening. If you stand against young people trying to get in their first homes, after every community office you've done, every phone bank you've done and every meeting you've had where someone has sat down and said, 'The answer is housing,' it means you've failed. I will not leave here having failed.

I will leave here knowing that my children have an opportunity to own their own home—that my grandchildren will create memories in a place that is theirs and that they will not be moved around from place to place. I lived in five different homes in two years because I was renting. That was hard for my girls.

It was hard for us to create memories. I don't want that for them. I don't want that for anybody.

I want everyone to be secure and safe in their own home. That is what this budget has always been about: delivering the great Australian dream.