Housing Australia Investment Mandate Amendment and Labor's Infrastructure Failures скачать в хорошем качестве

Housing Australia Investment Mandate Amendment and Labor's Infrastructure Failures

1 September, 2025 Mr KENNEDY (Cook): The Member for Hasluck wants to talk about the opposition. It is not surprising, because their record on housing is so poor. This amendment is deeply flawed. Australia's housing crisis is a gaping wound for Australia, and the policy platform that Labor has cobbled together is barely a bandaid and not enough to stop the bleeding. Labor's so-called build-to-rent and community housing model is upside down. It subsidises corporate investors, their superfund mates and even offshore entities to own the homes of hardworking Australians. Not young Australians, not the young mums and dads in my electorate who are sweating hard for a first home deposit—Labor doesn't want these people to own a home. That's not housing policy; it's asset allocation for superfunds, and it leaves ordinary Australians in my electorate, hardworking Australians, scrapping together to try to pay for a deposit, paying the price, funding superfunds and corporate investors to build assets that everyday Australians will never own. The Australian dream never was and never will be about being a permanent tenant. It never was about renting a unit or an apartment from some nameless multinational fund. It's about owning your own place, putting down roots, raising a family, building equity, building a future and building a stake in Australia. Under this government, more and more Australians will be tenants of superfunds, not homeowners in their own right. Labor wants to give homes to funds, leaving ordinary Australians to rent for life in the hope they'll vote for Labor. It's cynical, it's shortsighted, and it's selling out the Australian dream of homeownership. In my electorate of Cook, families tell me every single week they cannot break into the market. In Caringbah, Miranda and Sylvania, some of my more affordable suburbs, housing prices are still, on the median, up to $2 million. These are proud communities where people work hard, save hard and want the same chance their parents had. Yet first home buyers are being squeezed out by rising costs and a lack of supply. What's Labor's answer? It is not to help them buy, not to deliver ownership, but to hand taxpayer subsidies to institutional landlords to keep them renting. Young families can't keep up, and Labor's schemes won't help, because all they do is pit more buyers against each other for the same limited supply. Labor is turbocharging demand. On this so-called Home Guarantee Scheme, we've had independent warnings. A report from Lateral Economics has made it very clear: expanding this scheme risks driving prices up by 3½ per cent to 6.6 per cent—in some markets, almost 10 per cent. For first home buyers in Sydney and Cook, that may mean paying $100,000 to $200,000 more for a home. This is a government turbocharging demand, not just through this scheme but through migration. In the middle of a housing crisis, it should shock Australians to know that migration and our population are growing faster than any time in the last 75 years. What does this mean locally? In nearby Kirrawee, in the Cook electorate, there's at least a 14-storey high-rise precinct being pushed, and there's no clarity about who these apartments are for or who will own them. Are they going to be owned by super funds? Are they going to be corporate rentals? What we do know is local residents are being left in the dark. We know we're not getting upgrades to infrastructure or to schools, and this government's reckless migration policy is just shoving the pressure onto state governments, which are then shoving the pressure onto local communities with no respite in sight. That's the other side of the problem. If governments want to put more money in our suburbs, they also need to put money into infrastructure. You can't add thousands of units without adding schools for the children who'll live there. You can't pile on these high-rises without fixing the roads and the transport links that people rely on. Take this 14-storey development in Kirrawee—Flora Street and Oak Road are already gridlocked. I've had almost 200 signatures from people in my electorate asking for these roads to be upgraded and for the traffic signals to be upgraded, but, instead, what the government is now proposing is to put up a 14-storey apartment block. This is what happens when you get a federal Labor government teaming up with a state Labor government and a local Labor council. You get people destroying communities without the investment in infrastructure...