Unlocking Supply of Family Homes Bill 2025

Senator COLLINS (New South Wales—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (11:21): I also rise to speak to the Treasury laws amendment Unlocking Supply of Family Homes Bill 2025. I want to thank Senator Hume for bringing this very practical, excellent bill forward. It's a sensible bit of policy and at the right time in response, of course, to Labor's disastrous budget that we have seen has absolutely decimated our housing market at a time when it really didn't need it.

What we see in this bill is a measure trying to increase supply, which is what our housing market needs right now. It's a brilliant piece. It introduces flexibility and incentives to free up some of those family homes.

This reform complements the coalition's original downsizer contribution, which was introduced in 2017-18 and allowed over-55s to contribute part of the sale of their home to superannuation. With all of the brouhaha that we've had from Labor's worst budget ever, those opposite forget that we are actually in the midst of a housing crisis. When they handed down their budget, the housing market crashed.

Confidence crashed, and it did absolutely nothing to lift supply. I speak to young adults all the time, and you know what they're saying to me? They're moving back in to the family home with mum and dad because they can't afford to save for a deposit and they can't afford to rent.

In my home state of New South Wales and in Sydney city, we have record rents at the moment. The average rent in Sydney is $850 a week. If you are in a unit, the median price is between $800 and $1,000.50 every week—just for a unit.

That's an extraordinary amount of money when your wages aren't necessarily going up, but the prices are going up around you—your rents are going up, and you can't get milk and bread. For my family, I go every day to the supermarket to get three litres of milk and a loaf of bread. You can't get that for under $10.

They are just the very essentials for my family. Prices are going up; everything's going up, which makes it harder and harder for young people and young adults to save for their first home and get into the housing market. Of course, right now, that housing market is crashing.

The other effect that's having is that these young adults are putting off having children because they can't afford save up for a family home and get their family started, or they're moving further and further away from their family, from their roots and the places where they grew up. I don't think that's intergenerational fairness; I think that's wrong. I think we need to do something about it.

This bill is a step in the direction of providing more supply. We know that supply is key to solving this problem in the housing market. Labor has provided no real supply measures.

Billions of dollars, yes. More houses, no. Regulation is up.

Compliance is up. Construction costs are absolutely through the roof, up about 45 per cent under Labor. There are labour constraints.

Approvals processes are years behind, and there's a public sector that is crowding out the private sector. All those sole and small tradies that are trying to start a business, build a business, so they can build homes for families, young people, are all getting squeezed out by the public sector. Taxes and Labor's budget are sucking up supply.

They've completely crashed the market, and they've wiped out wealth right across the country. We know, at the same time, that they're not building up supply. They've got a mass migration agenda.

Demand is still high. There are a lot of people here in Australia that have just arrived in Australia that are looking for somewhere to live on top of everybody else that's already here in Australia that is looking for somewhere to live. It should be all shoulders to the wheel on boosting supply, not raising taxes and not taxing capital wealth.

Let's just take a little look at the numbers for today's position. Thanks to Labor's catapult launch into the dreams of Australian families, national clearance rates are at 55 per cent. It's the highest it's been in 11 weeks, but it's been declining over the year.

The cash rate is at 4.35 per cent, and ANZ is warning that property prices could decline by almost 15 per cent, wiping out the property values right across Australia. Families and young people that have just bought into the market are going into negative equity. We heard from Senator Pocock before about the homelessness crisis that is being driven by the market at the moment, by the economy, and all of this is going to take years to recover from.

The numbers are actually also looking worse than were originally forecast. The speed of the slump is unprecedented, and it's causing experts to review their forecasts sooner than expected. The June quarter saw the largest quarterly decline, at the start of the downturn, in more than 30 years of data.

It was bad, and it's going to get worse. And, of course, this is all the shock from Labor's disastrous budget. And yet they stand there and they back it in.

They say it's good for first home buyers. But what about everyone else? What about the hard work and sweat and tears—everything that went into buying those houses, only to find everything crash underneath them?

Families right across Australia are experiencing mortgage stress. Great job, Labor! You are hitting the socialist nail on the head with your wealth distribution agenda.

This bill is a simple and practical reform that helps address two problems at once: housing supply for younger Australians and retirement security for older Australians. It builds on the coalition's original downsizer contribution policy, which was reduced a few years ago. It makes it easier for older Australians to move into homes that better suit their needs but also frees up larger family homes for younger families.

This is giving incentive and flexibility into the market. It will really help young Australians achieve that great Australian dream of owning their own home. So how does it work?

The bill will lower the eligibility rate to access a downsizer contribution from 55 to 50 years of age, and it will also allow contributions into superannuation to take place one year after settlement—currently it's 90 days. It also increases the superannuation contribution amount from $300,000 to $500,000 per person. Doing quick maths on that, that's a million bucks per couple.

It's a good incentive. It's not just an innovative reform; it's a sensible one too. For those of us who live in major Australian cities, capital cities, where the average cost of a home is well into the millions, it makes complete sense to increase the amount that can be contributed to superannuation after a sale.

Increasing the contribution window makes sense too. Three months is a long time, but it can put unnecessary pressure on some couples to make a huge decision in an uncomfortable timeframe. As we heard from Senator Kovacic before, there are complications in trying to get that settlement out quickly.

Pushing it to a year gives flexibility and peace of mind to comfortably make that decision too. We are the party of choice, and this bill is in time and step with this. We wouldn't force anyone to downsize.

They have that choice. That opportunity and option would be there. Giving couples a choice to do so where they wouldn't find themselves otherwise in the lurch is what Liberal thinking is all about.

We want to make the idea of downsizing more attractive and more accessible. It boosts supply. It gets those big houses out to young people.

In my home state of New South Wales, the state Labor government is hell-bent on building more apartments, squeezing all these new families in Australia into apartments along train lines. I don't think that's the great Australian dream. I don't think that's what we all signed up for.

I don't think we're all going out every single day, working our guts out, to end up in a little apartment on the train line. It suits some but not everybody. Freeing up these family homes is a good thing to do.

The benefits will be more room for the kids and more babies for the extra rooms. That's also why I love this policy. It's pro family.

What I hear from a lot of young people is that they're having fewer children because of the housing crisis. It's too hard to get bigger homes these days to fit your kids in. So we've got to do something about that.

This bill is about intergenerational housing. I invite my Labor colleagues to support Senator Hume's bill because they've got to do something about housing supply and the next generation that's looking for stability. The coalition will make it cheaper and easier to build new homes by axing Labor's taxes on families and tradies and by slashing red tape and green tape, and we will be getting rid of Labor's failed housing bureaucracy.

There's $10 billion that's been poured into housing, and what have we seen from it? They said the Housing Australia Future Fund— Senator Green: It's for women fleeing domestic violence. Senator COLLINS: Yes, that's exactly right.

Thank you for the interjection, Assistant Minister Nita Green. Yes, 4,000 homes are meant to go to vulnerable women and children. Every single estimates, I ask how many of those houses have been built and how many are going to vulnerable women and children.

If you have the numbers on that I will take the interjection right now. Senator Green: I've seen it with my own eyes. Senator COLLINS: No numbers on that?

They cannot tell me how many homes are actually being built and delivered to vulnerable women and children through the Housing Australia Future Fund as they promised. They're not tracking it because they don't really care. That's the issue.

The coalition will establish a $5 billion housing infrastructure fund to help unlock up to 400,000 new homes, especially in regional Australia. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Sharma ): It now being 11.34, the time for this debate has expired. Senator Collins, you will be in continuation.