Interview with Sally Sara on ABC Radio National

‍Subjects: Budget, Housing taxes, Migration, Liberal Party

E&OE.........

Sally Sara

A bit of musical chairs in the studio Andrew Bragg has just stepped in Andrew Bragg is the Shadow Minister for Housing Homelessness and also Shadow Minister for Environment. Andrew Bragg, welcome back.

Senator Bragg

Sally, how are you.

Sally Sara

Very well thank you. The government has proposed tax reforms in the Budget to improve generational equity in its view. Does the Coalition agree there's an issue of intergenerational inequality in Australia when it comes to housing?

Senator Bragg

Well, I think the inequality that you're going to see is that younger generations won't be able to use the same wealth building opportunities that were available to older generations including the Prime Minister himself.

Sally Sara

If they go for new homes, they will.

Senator Bragg

But I mean the idea is that we need to have lower taxes. I mean we have a repressive pay as you go system. We have almost the highest pay as you go system in the world for income earners and now we have the highest Capital Gains Tax system in the world. So, like it's getting harder and harder for younger people. Everywhere you look there are new taxes.

Sally Sara

The Opposition’s already been clear it won't be supporting changes to negative gearing and the Capital Gains Tax discount. What's your message to younger Australians who feel locked out of the housing market?

Senator Bragg

Well, this is a supply side problem and so we want to get building houses. We also think that lower taxes will help build more tax build more houses I should say. And so that's really our message. I mean ultimately if you want to help younger people you need to create opportunities for them. So a younger person who wants to invest in a share or an ETF or wants to invest in crypto or wants to invest in a house, I mean none of these things now are tax advantaged. I mean you're looking at a 30% minimum tax.

Sally Sara

I'm speaking with the Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness Andrew Bragg on Radio National Breakfast. Opposition leader Angus Taylor will deliver his Budget Reply speech tonight. He's expected to unveil a plan to cut migration by linking net overseas migration to the pace of home building. How would this work?

Senator Bragg

Well, I've been asking for many years in Senate Estimates including to Katy Gallagher why doesn't the government model the impact of allowing 1.4 million people into the country but only building 600,000 houses and the government...

Sally Sara

And some of those are Australians returning.

Senator Bragg

Well, that's right but I mean ultimately it's still a large number of people coming into the country as migrants and her answer has always been...

Sally Sara

Well, they're not all migrants.

Senator Bragg

But her answer has always been well we're not going to do that that piece of modelling. I mean we think that if you have more people in the country, you should be looking to have more homes. Like it's pretty simple. So, we think it's a reasonable nexus to look at and it'll be part of our policy making.

Sally Sara

So how would that actually work?

Senator Bragg

Well, I mean it's pretty simple, if you don't make the completions that are required to house Australians then you'd look to cap certain visa classes.

Sally Sara

So, you base it off the housing numbers and then determine what the forward migration number will be, is that what you mean?

Senator Bragg

The first thing you do is you'd actually do some basic modelling to work out how many houses you actually need to house the Australian population which is something that the government haven't bothered to do. And then you'd have all the information and then you can look at well how many houses do we need and if we don't get the houses we need then we'd look to cap certain visa classes. As part of that we'd also want to make sure we bring in the workers we need to actually build houses, because even though we've had a large migration program we haven't got the tradies we need so for example in home building we need 80,000 more tradies last year we only got 4,000 of those on tradie visas.

Sally Sara

And what's the assumption underlying this in terms of how many people per home will it be the equivalent of one person per house built?

Senator Bragg

No, I mean that's all the modelling that we need to do. I mean the fact that that modelling hasn't been done by the Treasury I think is really a disgrace. I think that most Australians would say well if your population is growing by up to two million people and you're only building 600,000 houses then that's going to be a problem. So we're going to do that modelling and that'll be part of our policy going forward.

Sally Sara

But will it be one for one or the household now is I think 2.6?

Senator Bragg

As I said as I said we'll do that modelling.

Sally Sara

Migrants often meet demand in industries with skill shortages as you were mentioning. How will the Coalition cut migration but increase the workforce that is needed?

Senator Bragg

Well you can change you can recalibrate the overall mix of people coming in through the different visa classes. That's something that we'll be doing more work on over the next few months. But I mean this is not about blaming migrants this is about blaming the government for mismanaging these things.

Sally Sara

Was this policy made in consultation with business groups?

Senator Bragg

Well we always consult widely and ultimately I think it's been pretty clear that this is something that needs to be done. We want we want to restore we also want to restore confidence in our migration system that we've actually got control of it as a country. I mean the housing system is out of control. The government have spent $80 billion to build fewer houses. I mean the supply crunch here is really acute. I mean who could believe that you could spend $80 billion of taxpayer funds to build 30,000 fewer houses a year.

Sally Sara

So just going back to the question, was consultation undertaken with business groups on this particular policy idea?

Senator Bragg

Well of course there's always consultation I mean we always we're always engaging widely.

Sally Sara

Finally, last time you're on the program you said the Coalition should revive something on the scale of Fightback!. Are you optimistic that Angus Taylor will deliver something on that scale tonight?

Senator Bragg

Well I'm hopeful that'll be a start tonight but I mean we need to do a lot of work, I think we need to be looking very clearly at how we can relieve the Pay As You Go tax system. We need to be creating incentives for people to invest. As I said it's a pretty hard place to live and work when taxes are so high, so we've got to do a lot of heavy lifting there and I think we need a big bold platform the biggest we've had in 30 years.

Sally Sara

How much of a test is this tonight for Angus Taylor? It doesn't feel like it but the Farrer by-election was only on the weekend. It was a bruising experience. How important is it to get it right tonight?

Senator Bragg

Oh look he's been in the job for three months so I'm sure he'll do a good job tonight that'll be a start but I mean I don't expect anyone would assume that all our policies will be announced tonight. But my point is that we need to be very bold and ambitious here. I think that the Budget is completely out of control. The tax system is completely broken. I mean we need to see more than just a few fiddles. I think we need to be looking again at the IR system I think we need to be looking at whether the super thing is working I think there's some really big things in our economy that are making the overall system very sick and if we don't address these things now then when would we ever address them given where we are in the overall position right now.

Sally Sara

Andrew Bragg good to have you back in the studio this morning, thank you very much.

Senator Bragg

Thanks, Sally.

[Ends]

‍