CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr HILL (Bruce—Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs and Assistant Minister for International Education) (09:57): One of the things that we've been hearing over the last couple of weeks, out in the community—I was at the Berwick market on Sunday morning; around Dandenong at lunchtime—is the question of house prices. What's going to happen with house prices with the government's tax changes?

I want to make a couple of points. What we have seen with respect to house prices over the past 20 years is completely unsustainable. House prices have risen twice as fast as wages.

House prices in Australia have risen twice as fast as incomes. That's completely unsustainable for any society. First and foremost, housing is a good that you need people to live in.

We want people to aspire to home ownership and to get into the housing market, and yet for the past 20 years it has felt like, however fast they save on the treadmill, house prices just race ahead twice as fast—and that's what the data shows. The opposition's policy depends on who you ask. Some of them go on TV and say, 'We want house prices to go up.' Others go on TV and say, 'We want house prices to go down'.

I'll tell you what my position is and what the government's position is. I want to see wages in this country grow faster than the price of housing. We have to repair that ratio for the next generation, to give them a fair chance at owning a house, and so we want to see real wage growth rising faster than house prices once again.

We saw the opposition leader, Mr Taylor, out in Narrabundah today. For those listening at home, Narrabundah is a pretty wealthy suburb in Canberra. He was standing in front of a flat this morning that, in 2006, sold for $420,000.

The asking price today is $900,000. He thinks that's not a problem. He thinks nothing needs to change.

If the opposition want to keep everything the same, I say things have to change. The government's policies and changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax will see 75,000 more Australians be able to enter the home market and give homebuyers and first home buyers a fair go against investors. The opposition says they want to keep everything the same.

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. It's about time the Liberal Party admitted that there was a problem in the housing market. It's fundamentally cooked and unfair.

The definition of insanity, of course, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, which is what we see from the Liberal Party. Actually, I'm going to contradict myself; I'll finish on this point. They do have one policy for housing: super for housing.

The gold medal policy for stupidity would be to let people drain their retirement savings and push up the cost of housing. It'd be like pouring petrol on a bin fire. So I say very clearly to young Australians that the government's tax changes are about giving you a fair go at getting into the housing market.

The Liberal Party think nothing should change.