Doorstop 11 November 2026

ABS lending indicators data, new home loans collapse, housing taxes, housing supply, negative gearing.

‍

E&OE....

‍

Senator Bragg

‍

We live in very strange times when we see the Housing Minister today say that it's a good thing that there are fewer loans. What the ABS has shown this afternoon is that lending to households in Australia is falling through the floor. We see fewer loans to first-home owners. We see fewer loans to owner-occupiers. We see fewer loans to renters. We see fewer loans to everyone. We see fewer loans to investors. So no one has won from these taxes, which have smashed the housing system overall.

‍

And I make the point that people would look at what Clare O'Neil says and think, "Well, what planet is she living on? Why is she saying that fewer loans is good?" Fewer loans is bad. We need to see more lending, because if we have more lending, then we have more houses. That's how the system works: more lending means more housing. And so the ABS data today shows a 15% drop in home lending, it shows a 5% drop in lending to owner-occupiers, and it shows an 8% drop in lending to first-home owners. So first-home owners lose, owner-occupiers lose, investors lose, rents go up—everyone loses here. So this has been an absolute disaster.

‍

The fact that the Government have introduced new taxes at a point in time when the housing system was already struggling because of their heavy regulatory burden shows they have no idea, and they could never, ever fix the housing system that they have actually made into the worst shape that it's ever been in Australian history. I mean, we are getting 30,000 fewer houses a year under this Government. We are seeing taxes now send us probably even below 170,000 houses. We used to get 200,000. And what we need in this country is a quarter of a million houses.

‍

So seven months after the Budget, you can look at it and you can say, "Well, who wins from this Budget?" It's not renters, it's not owners, it's not investors, it's certainly not first-home owners. This has been a disaster, and it is time for Jim Chalmers to pull apart this tax hike that he has imposed on the Australian people.

‍

If it is true that he did do a PhD on Paul Keating, he needs to dust it off and read it again, because when Paul Keating abolished negative gearing in 1985, he had to reinstate it in 1987 because it was such a disaster. It pushed up rents, it damaged the housing system, and what we're seeing today is the direct impact of taxes crimping loans, and fewer loans means fewer homeowners. Fewer loans means fewer Australians living in a house of their own, and that is what these taxes have done. They should be repealed, and if we win the next election, one of the first orders of business we will have is to repeal these terrible taxes, because after all, who would honestly believe that more taxes would deliver more housing?

‍

It won't, it never will. There's no arrangement in which more taxes will give you more houses, and the experiment of the 1980s in this country has now been repeated by Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese in 2026. And we've seen the same result we saw in 1985 to 1987: that higher taxes means fewer houses, higher rents, no one wins.

‍

[Ends] 

‍