QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms O'NEIL (Hotham—Minister for Housing, Minister for Homelessness and Minister for Cities) (14:55): I thank the member for Dickson for this question. Not only is this woman a remarkable Australian but she is one of the strongest voices in this parliament for housing policy, and I want to thank her for her leadership. Our housing tax reforms have two really clear goals.
The first is to give first home buyers a better shot at getting the keys to their own home, and we want to encourage more investment in building the homes Australia needs. It's early days since the budget, but we are seeing some really encouraging signs in what is coming out of the sector. The latest ABS data shows that lending to investors buying new dwellings is up more than 27 per cent on last year.
What remarkable growth. At the same time, we are seeing investor lending for construction rise 4.4 per cent. It is now 20 per cent higher than it was a year ago.
That same data shows us that investor lending to buy existing homes fell almost 15 per cent in the June quarter, and data from our five per cent deposit program shows us that we have got first home buyers around this country going to auctions, and they are winning. These are the exact directions that we want to see from the housing market. We want to see less investor money chasing up the house prices of homes that we already have.
We want to see more investment helping build the homes our country needs, and we want to see those scales tipped right back in favour of first home buyers. We are seeing support for these measures from some, frankly, quite surprising quarters. I want to share with you a quote from Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, who has said: Investing or supporting businesses so they can invest, grow and employ people is going to deliver a better overall outcome for the country than buying and selling housing to each other.
We had the National Australia Bank's chief economist, Sally Auld, say, on 7.30: … over the long run, it's … owner-occupiers who are the winners in all of this, in the sense that we're going to redistribute … the ownership of housing away from investors and more towards owner-occupiers. We have even got leaders in our banking sector who can see that these changes are in the national interest.
Why can't the coalition and One Nation see the same? When we look at the facts, we have got home ownership rates for young people around this country falling through the floor; 81 per cent of millennials and gen Z tell us that they are delaying major life decisions—delaying getting married and delaying having a child—because they are concerned about housing insecurity.
Yet still, those opposite spend their time in this parliament defending a broken housing system. Well, I say, very directly to Australians: we hear you, we see the pain that you are in, and we will keep delivering you the real change you need to get into a home of your own.