MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (16:14): This has been an embarrassing time to be an Australian, between the diplomatic incidents created by the Prime Minister's appalling discussion about the Japanese prime minister and then the general chaos of the economic mismanagement that we've seen since the budget. I think many Australians would say, 'Why is housing so buggered in this country?' and the answer is that this government has made it so much worse by giving us more tax, more regulation and more corruption than we've ever seen before in the housing system.
On the first point, on tax, the government has a deliberate design feature to reduce housing supply. They've got in their budget some sort of tricky offset. They say that they're going to have an infrastructure fund which may supply more homes, but they have a deliberate design feature to reduce by 35,000 the houses that would have been funded by individuals.
I make that point—individuals. The government is against individuals investing to create houses for other Australians. They think this is a bad thing—it's bad for the individual—and they are desperate to help their friends at the union and industry super cartel to become landlords.
This is all part of their great Australian dream, trying to completely change the character of Australian housing. The chasing of individuals out of the housing market as investors is a top priority for this government. They think it's very bad that individuals should invest for their future because the only investment the Labor Party likes is when the investment is in a compulsory superannuation scheme which they can use to pilfer—and all their friends can get their snouts in the trough.
This is the theory behind this budget: 'We want to chase out individual investors.' Of course, on the way through, they've caused themselves a number of problems. What's been exposed is this widow's tax and a number of other technical issues, including the fact that the Treasurer—Dr Chalmers or whatever he calls himself now—has passed a budget bill ostensibly about housing taxes without a definition of what a new build is.
What a joke of a country we've become! If this treasurer, this pathetic treasurer, had been the CFO of a company, he would have walked the plank years ago. His first tax policy on unrealised gains collapsed.
His second tax policy on negative gearing and CGT has collapsed. What a joke! You pass a budget with a tax hike as the centrepiece and you have no idea what a new build is, which is just ridiculous.
So they've got to come back and tidy this up. They say they'll fix up this widows tax. Let's see.
I'd say they've been pretty callous about this. For the people that have had to suffer through these widows tax transactions, it's a terrible time because there's no certainty that they can actually get from their government because it hasn't passed this chamber. Similarly, the government was desperate to pass their terrible budget.
They came to the coalition, I imagine, and said, 'Look, would you like to pass our $77 billion of new taxes?' and we said, 'No, thank you,' so they went to the Greens. The Greens said, 'Yes, we would love to help you pass your $77 billion in new taxes on the economy, because we think that it's good to have more taxes on housing.' I'm sure that will solve the problem.
Housing is already very heavily taxed, so more taxes will create more houses. The price the Greens party asked of the Labor Party was this: 'We want you to abolish the ability of SMSFs to borrow to invest in residential property because that's something that's hurting Cbus, hurting Australian Super and hurting all our mates. They're losing market share.
We've got to stop that from happening because it's terrible that people would invest to purchase new properties off the plan and create new houses for other Australians. That's terrible.' When the Australian people have to consider why rents are sky high and why affordability is in the toilet, it's because the government hates new housing. They've got a policy to tax it into oblivion.
They've got a policy to cancel the ability of other Australians to provide rental stock for Australians. That is why we're in a terrible, terrible mess. As I say, it's been an embarrassing time to be in Australia, with this shambles of a budget and a prime minister who goes around the world embarrassing the nation by engaging in disgusting phrases and terminology that should be beneath the office of a prime minister.
And this Treasurer, Dr Chalmers—I think he calls himself that now—needs to go back to do another PhD on actual economics so he can learn how to do a budget. The PRESIDENT: The question is that the urgency motion moved by Senator Cash be agreed to.