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EXCLUSIVE The shadow housing minister has lampooned the government’s 1.2 million housing target, adding the Liberal Party will release new housing supply policies before the next election.
The shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg has told The Adviser that the Liberal Party will “have a supply policy before the election” that will be “much stronger” than the Albanese government’s current policies.
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Speaking on The Adviser’s In Focus podcast about the Senate’s new inquiry into the financial regulatory framework and home ownership, the shadow housing minister and Liberal senator for NSW revealed that the Liberal Party would look to bring in new housing supply policies to fix the housing crisis.
Bragg criticised the Albanese government’s current work on housing – including its 1.2 million housing target – as “a joke”.
He said: “The 1.2 million target is a joke. I mean, we’re 300,000 short of that, and that will never be met.”
Bragg said that the delivery of housing policy was determined by state governments, but said it was important to be “encouraging the states” to achieve federal government policy “or maybe even finding a way to punish the states if they don’t comply”.
When asked what he believed needed to be done to improve housing supply and home ownership, the shadow housing minister criticised the current government’s work.
He said: “The Labor Party have had four housing policies. They’ve had to Help to Buy – a scheme where the government owns 40 per cent of your house. That was the centrepiece of their last election campaign launch. They haven’t even brought that bill into parliament for a debate or for a vote to they’re obviously ashamed of that policy.
“Secondly, they’ve got the housing targets, which we just discussed have failed.
“Thirdly, they got the Housing Australia Future Fund, which is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle fund, which has built no houses.
“And then they’ve got – what I would say, their worst policy (which is big call) they’re Build to Rent tax concessions, which is about getting foreign fund managers to build and own Australian housing. So, an Americanisation of our housing stock.”
Should super funds own homes?
He later told the In Focus podcast that he believed Labor was pursuing a “warped agenda” on housing, which he claims favours superannuation funds and foreign fund managers over the Australian public.
“The Labor government is obsessed with trying to help their mates with the big super funds and their housing solutions are around institutions providing build-to-rent stock, for example, financed by foreign fund managers,” he said.
“They have a bill in Parliament to cut taxes for foreign fund managers and then they try to help Cbus and these sort of funds build houses,” Bragg told In Focus a day after he tabled a bill in the Senate to amend the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) Act to prohibit Cbus’ involvement in the initiative.
He said that he didn’t believe that companies like BlackRock or Vanguard should be “owning our houses”.
When asked why he viewed the involvement of some of the world’s largest asset managers in rebuilding Australia’s housing stock as problematic, Bragg simply replied: “I want people to own houses.”
While the shadow housing minister said the details of the Liberal’s supply policy were “still under development”, he said that “there’ll be more speeches in the weeks ahead and more things to be said about housing”.
“We will have a supply policy before the election that will be much stronger ... We understand how important it is to solving the housing crisis.”
You can listen to the full interview with senator Andrew Bragg on the home ownership issue and why he most wants to hear from brokers here:
[Related: ‘I want to hear from brokers the most’ for housing inquiry: Senator Bragg]
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