Doorstop 02 November 2026

Subjects: Housing market downturn, housing taxes, high rents, low housing supply, Housing Australia Future Fund, first-home buyer mortgage data, intergenerational fairness.

E&OE....

Senator Bragg:

Well, six months after the Budget, it's extraordinary that these housing taxes have had such a wrecking ball effect on the Australian housing market. But perhaps it isn't that surprising when you think that the normal rules of economics have not been suspended for Jim Chalmers, who is clearly battling as the Treasurer.

Now, we've seen higher rents, we've seen fewer houses built, and we have fewer loans to owner-occupiers. So first-home buyers lose, renters lose, investors lose, owners lose—everyone loses out of these taxes. They are a disaster and have been one of the biggest disasters of Australian economic policy in my lifetime.

Now, when you look at the rents today, we see rents going up, predicted to go up by $2 a week in Sydney under Chalmers's Budget, but they're going up by 200 bucks a week in some cases. So we've seen massive increases in rents. And this is one of the reasons why we want to make sure that we don't become a nation of retired renters. And over the next five years, we're going to become a nation with more than 1 million retired renters, which is why we want to make sure that people have all the opportunities to own their own house, because the best form of retirement security is owning your own house.

Accordingly, we're looking at how the housing and the retirement and the super systems work together to maximise the opportunity for home ownership. If we hit that one million mark of retired renters, it's going to be a lot of pain for people, because if you are a retired renter on the Pension, it's going to be very hard going for you in retirement. Now, when super started back in 1992, it was assumed that you would own your own house, but now that is becoming an illusion for too many Australians.

So if you look at the overall picture, after six months, we have fewer houses, we have a disastrous Housing Australia Future Fund, which has been maladministered, where we see the Government have spent $10 billion over three years to get just a couple of thousand houses. I mean, seriously, this is going to be one of the worst programs in the history of the Australian Federation. Then we have the projection for fewer houses, and we're already getting 30,000 fewer houses a year. And then we see fewer loans to first-home buyers.

Now, when Chalmers stood up and gave his Budget Speech, he said he cared about intergenerational fairness. All he has given younger people—millennials, Gen Zs, and the rest—is unfair, because the higher taxes have meant that there are fewer of them being able to get their first house, and we see it in the mortgage data. So the overall picture is a housing disaster, which won't improve until this Labor Government is put to death.

[Ends]