QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator LIDDLE (South Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (15:02): I move: That the Senate take note of all coalition questions. It is dishonest and delusional to suggest that the housing market is doing well under Labor, that they're fixing housing in Australia. The evidence says different, and you're not fooling anyone who's out there in the market currently.

Westpac mortgage applications fell 20 per cent. Investor housing credit growth is forecast to drop from 9.1 per cent this year to 4.4 per cent by 2028, driven by higher rates and Labor's policy changes. Auction clearance rates for the week finishing 1 August were 46.7 per cent in Adelaide, my home state.

That's down from 74.5 per cent in the same week last year. That's not an improvement; that's going backwards. House prices must become more affordable for young Australians, but the answer isn't to crash the family home—it's lowering inflation, lowering rates, raising real wages, providing more homes and more opportunity, and having less spending by those opposite.

A housing minister floating a 10 to 20 per cent price correction is not a housing plan; it's a warning to every family with a mortgage and every young Australian eyeing the market. You're not helping first home buyers. It's smashing their confidence, hitting investment, pushing up rents, building fewer homes and making it harder for them to get ahead not just in the home purchase but in saving for the home too.

The only things that Labor is actually building are excuses. Labor's toxic taxes have acted like a wrecking ball on the housing market. More borrowing capacity for first home buyers doesn't mean more affordability.

It means higher repayments for life and higher prices. You've brought in 1.4 million people, roughly the population of Adelaide, with 90,000 more planned to arrive in the next two years, stoking demand while housing supply shrinks. You're not building the houses that you said you would build in the budget.

You're building fewer homes—35,000 fewer. What about rents? On page 159, you said: The reforms are likely to have a small impact on rents, with an expected increase of less than $2 per week … That's not what's actually happening.

In places like Sydney, independent economists estimate that rents could rise by up to $160 a week and by $130 a week in Melbourne. When investment is driven out of the rental market, landlords pass on the costs. Fewer rentals mean fewer and higher rents.

I don't understand why Labor doesn't get that. It's economics 101. It's pretty simple.

When you don't build the houses, when you bring in more people, when you make it more costly to buy that house—because the cost of living continues to go through the roof, and, with that, interest rates—and when the cost of servicing that mortgage continues to remain high, you're not being affected positively; you're being affected negatively. That's the impact on housing under Labor.

That's the impact on all Australians. You're leaving people behind. (Time expired)