PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr REBELLO (McPherson) (12:17): I rise to speak to this motion moved by the member for Fadden, and it is a brilliant motion because it calls out this government and calls out the fact that Labor is doing the one thing that you should never do in a housing crisis—make supply harder. The rule is simple: if you tax something, you get less of it. If you tax investment and if you tax housing investment, you get fewer home.

If you tax builders, buyers and investors, you get higher rents and a smaller pipeline. Even Labor knows that supply is the problem, because we've seen the housing minister say that the crisis has 'one principal reason: we have not built enough homes'. If the government could do one thing, it would be to 'build more homes more quickly'.

And I agree with that. The question then becomes: what is this government doing? They're not clearing the road.

They're not cutting the costs. They're not backing the builders. They've reached for the oldest Labor instinct in the book—tax, tax, tax.

These higher taxes are not a housing plan. They're a housing handbrake. Their own policy, according to their own budget papers, means that 35,000 fewer homes will be built.

It means higher rents and it means less private investment. We know that, if we want to rely on somebody to build new houses, we rely on the private sector over the government any day. Taxes, fees and charges already add up to 50 per cent of the cost of a new home.

Up to 50 per cent of the cost of the new homes are made up of taxes and charges and fees. Naturally, Labor looked at a house already drowning in tax and thought, 'Let's add another brick.' This isn't reform. It's vandalism with a spreadsheet.

Labor claims that first home buyers will be better off. Well, please. We're not seeing that, and Australians are seeing through that incredibly outdated and unrealistic logic.

If first home buyers were supposedly lining up to grab these homes, we would see clearance rates being very different to what they are now, because clearance rates, currently, are cratering, and auctions would not be going cold if that were the case. Labor has not created confidence; they have spooked the market. And their own target of 1.2 million homes promised is already in the bin.

We're seeing that it is more than 100,000 dwellings behind, and Labor is projected to miss their target by well over 200,000. It's not just underperformance; it's a government that's failing at its own plan. Migration is making the pressure even worse, because population growth has grown by about 1.9 million since 2022 while fewer than 615,000 new homes have been completed.

So Labor has brought in more people than the housing market could absorb while at the same time failing to bring in enough tradies to build the homes we need. You can't run a big migration program on a small housing pipeline. Then there's red tape.

Labor promised to cut it. Instead, builders are facing thousands of rules, a National Construction Code has blown out past 2,000 pages, and costs keep rising. And Labor is prioritising environmental activism over price, which Australians tell me day in day and day out that they do not want to see.

They're focused on a government that needs to bring the cost of living down and the cost of homeownership down. We've seen a government whose net zero obsession has infected the National Construction Code, forcing all new home buyers to live in woke palaces at the expense of affordable housing. You can't regulate your way to more homes; you need builders onsite, not buried in paperwork.

The coalition's approach is common sense. You build more homes, lower taxes, have less red tape, tie migration to housing completions and have skilled migration that brings in the tradies we need. On the other side, Labor's plan is higher taxes, more regulation and more gimmicks.

You can't tax your way out of a housing crisis, you can't regulate your way out of a housing crisis and you can't spin your way out of one. These taxes are an absolute sledgehammer on the Australian economy and on the Australian dream, and they should be axed.